How Do You Talk to an Angel?
by Elizar Naki
Summary: Shinji's class gets a new addition that changes his life forever.  Prologue to the upcoming "Chosen of Lilith" fic.  AU, ShinjixRei.  Crappy summary, but please r&r anyway.
1. Shinji's World

Foreword: this one's actually a prequel of sorts to a project that's been rattling around in my head in one form or other for seven or eight years now. The main fic takes place several years after this, but there'd be a lot of backstory lost if I didn't do this one too, so…yeah, here we are. Hope nobody objects.

Needless disclaimer: still don't own Eva. Never have, never will.

* * *

How Do You Talk to an Angel?

by Elizar Naki

Chapter 1: "World According to Shinji"

Absence made the heart grow fonder. That was how the saying went, anyway. In essence, the saying meant that, the longer a person spent away from something, the more they came to appreciate that something when they were able to partake of it again. Of course, the concept only worked if the thing in question was something the person actually _enjoyed_. If the person found the something they were missing unappealing, the absence would always be too short.

_Somehow, I doubt anyone's ever applied that saying to school_, Shinji Ikari thought as he returned to class after far too short a semester break. So far, almost nobody else had shown up; even Hikari Horaki seemed to be taking her time getting to class for a change. For anyone else, Shinji wouldn't have found that unusual, but if the class rep was later than usual arriving, it probably meant something at least marginally interesting was going to happen.

Not that Shinji actually had anything against school. He actually had one of the highest GPAs in his grade, slightly below Hikari, above Mari, and usually a point or two off from Kensuke one way or the other. It was just…he wasn't really that passionate about school. He wasn't that passionate about anything, really—ever since he'd lost his mother to cancer a decade ago, and his father had basically turned his heart off to everyone around him, Shinji had pretty much just existed from moment to moment, not really caring that much about where any of it took him. School was okay-ish most of the time, while his home life was little more than a train wreck in progress. He enjoyed the time he spent practicing the cello, putting in the occasional bit of work on his writing, or cooking dinner and _bento_ boxes for himself and the mostly-absent Gendo Ikari (even if he never expressed any gratitude for it), and he usually enjoyed the time he spent with his friends, but he wouldn't really call himself passionate about any of it.

Not that he had a whole lot of people he could call friends, either. In fact, he could count them on the fingers of one hand with a few to spare. Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida, the jockstrap and military _otaku_/camera buff of the class, were probably the only two he'd call real friends. Hikari had sort of grafted herself onto their little trio once she and Toji had started dating, and while Shinji had nothing against her, they still didn't talk that much when they were on their own. He'd counted the rather bookish Mayumi Yamagishi as a decent enough friend, but she'd been distancing herself from their group ever since she and Kensuke had broken up last semester.

Then there was Mari Makinami. Her mother worked at the base his father ran, and he and Mari had met at his mother's funeral almost a decade ago. They'd quickly become friends, and at one time he would've called her his best friend. Then they'd hit junior high, and Mari's priorities had changed almost overnight. Being "popular" suddenly became the most important thing in the world to her, and Shinji found that Mari "The Illustrious One" Makinami no longer had time for her socially stunted childhood friend. That had hurt Shinji for a while, but once he saw the exceedingly shallow person she'd grown into, he found that he no longer minded being excluded from her clique-ish social circle.

That, for all intents and purposes, was it. He'd never been good at making friends—Toji had insisted on befriending Shinji after a misunderstanding had led to the jock giving him a black eye, and Kensuke had basically come along as part of the package. He knew other people in his class, of course, and he was polite enough with most of them if he ended up working with them on a project, but his extremely introverted ways kept things from ever being more than just…cordial. It was probably better that way anyway, Shinji had decided long ago; the fewer people he got close to, the less chance he had of one of them hurting him in the end.

"Yo! Shinji!" the aforementioned jock called out as he entered the room, Kensuke close behind with his ever-present camcorder recording the day's events for posterity (or blackmail, whichever seemed more appropriate). "Wassup, man? How was your break? Anything exciting happen?"

Shinji didn't even try to suppress the slight laugh he felt coming on at just how transparent Toji was being. "What do you want, Toji?" he asked with a grin.

"Want?" the burlier boy asked, acting surprised at Shinji's response. "What makes you think I want something?"

"You called him 'Shinji,'" Kensuke answered, still filming the scene for later. "Usually you call him 'Shin-man,' 'Shin-dude,' 'Prof,' or one of any number of nicknames you make up. You only call him 'Shinji' when you need him to help you with something."

"Alright, fine," Toji admitted with a frustrated growl. He hated being seen as predictable, but he had to admit that they had a point this time. "Me and Double-H's anniversary is coming up, and I was hoping you'd help me come up with something really special we could do."

"Well first off, you know she hates being called that," Shinji couldn't help but remind him. "Second, it's _your_ relationship. Shouldn't you be the one coming up with this stuff?" Toji was like that most of the time, Shinji had noticed; he wasn't dumb by any stretch of the word—certainly not as dumb as he sometimes came across—but he rarely got motivated enough to do his own work, whether for class or in his relationship with Hikari. That was also why he had gotten into the advanced class with Shinji and the others but had some of the worst grades in the class.

"Yeah, but you're better at all this romantic stuff than me," Toji countered.

_And yet ironically, I'm the only one of the three of us who's never had a date of his own_, Shinji thought ruefully. He'd helped set Kensuke and Mayumi up, and he was almost constantly playing Cyrano to Toji's Christian (minus the unrequited love on his end of things, obviously), but he had yet to have a girl take any real interest in him. Some of them had flirted with him for a little while once they'd reached "that" age, but their interest had quickly faded, though whether that was due to a lack of genuine interest on their part or a lack of reaction on his, Shinji couldn't tell and only sort of cared. The girls his age were almost all too superficial for his tastes, and while he would've liked to have had someone of his own to use all the romantic ideas he kept passing off to his friends on, there really wasn't anyone he was interested in enough to even consider using them on.

"Alright, Toji," Shinji finally conceded with a sigh. "But you're really gonna owe me this time."

"Yeah, yeah, sure," Toji said, seemingly having already reached that conclusion. "Whatcha want this time? Two, three thousand yen?"

Shinji pretended to consider the question for a moment or two, taking the time to observe the classroom a little. More students had begun to file in after Toji and Kensuke's arrival, and almost the entirety of their class had arrived by now. _Still no Hikari, though,_ Shinji noticed. Something was definitely up. "Well," he finally said, "there is that new Smash Bros. game that came out last week…"

"WHAT!" Toji exclaimed, drawing the attention of a couple of their classmates for a moment before they went back to their own pre-class discussions. "That's, like, 6500 yen!"

"Yeah," Kensuke said from behind his camcorder. "And this is a really special occasion you want his help with. Can't expect something for nothing in a case like this, y'know."

_Blackmail,_ Shinji decided with a smile. _Definitely blackmail today._

"Hmmph," the Osaka-born jock said, crossing his arms over his chest in frustration. "Traitors and extortionists, the both of ya. Fine, we can go get your game after school today—but you're helping me come up with something on the way to the store!"

"Pleasure doing business with you, Toji," Shinji said with a little laugh, "as always. Although," he added with a look around the class, "where is Hikari, anyway? Usually she'd be here by now."

"Dunno," Toji told him, taking a seat on top of his desk. "The teacher pulled her aside on our way into the building, said he had class business to discuss with her. Probably just some new rule they want her to enforce or something."

"Or it could be a new student," Kensuke threw in. "Oh, I hope it's another cute girl!"

"Yeah, like you'd have a shot if it was," Toji threw in.

"I would if the class Cupid helps me. And I've got enough saved up to cover whatever fee you think is appropriate," Kensuke countered, directing the last part to Shinji himself.

_Oh brother,_ Shinji thought with a roll of his eyes. _And I thought I was the lonely one here._

Before he could say anything, though, the door slid open, admitting their homeroom teacher into the room. Hikari wasn't far behind him. "STAND!" she directed the assembled class, taking charge as if she'd been there the whole time. "Bow! Take your seats." The rest of the class followed her instructions by rote at this point, putting their various conversations on hold for the time being and returning to their assigned seats. Not for the first time, Shinji marveled at how easily someone as diminutive and cutesy-looking as Hikari could take on the role of class representative with so few problems. Then again, he'd also seen firsthand that looks, in her case, were deceptive.

"Class, we have a new student joining us today," the teacher said once he was situated behind his desk. "Please do your best to make her feel welcome. Miss Horaki, please show her in."

"Yes, sir," Hikari said, returning to the door and whispering something to the girl waiting outside.

The announcement set off a predictable amount of whispering between Shinji's classmates, the guys (and a girl or two) hoping the new girl would be cute and single (and of their orientation), while the girls (and a guy or two) were hoping she'd be interested in joining their club. Shinji figured it didn't really matter what his new classmate was like since it wasn't likely to effect his daily routine that much; after all, one more classmate was just one more person for him to be cordial to when necessary but otherwise ignore and be ignored by most of the time. Nothing beyond that really mattered all that much to him.

Hikari returned to her seat, allowing the new girl entry into the room…at which point Shinji was forced to revise his opinion about how the class's newest addition would affect things for him. The new girl looked to be around his height, with short, unruly blue hair, brilliant red eyes, and skin so pale it nearly shone in the light. He normally didn't care that much about other people's appearances, but this girl was so stunningly beautiful that he actually found himself having trouble looking away, her unusual pigmentation only adding to the almost otherworldly beauty she possessed. At the same time, though, there was something in the girl's demeanor that also caught a part of Shinji's attention. Her expression appeared carefully neutral, but while he thought he could see something beneath that neutrality, it was hard to make out just what. Sadness, perhaps? Frustration? Confusion?

"Hello," the girl said when she reached the front of the class. "I'm Rei Ayanami. It's nice to meet you all." Her tone, like her expression, was carefully neutral, making it hard to tell if she really meant what she was saying or was simply being polite.

"Thank you, Miss Ayanami," the teacher told her. "Please take an empty seat so we can get started."

"Yes, sir," Ayanami replied, walking down an aisle of desks to find herself a seat. Shinji noticed her gaze shifting back and forth, seemingly taking in the classroom and its inhabitants. His breath caught as her crimson eyes locked with his sapphire ones for a moment—it might have been his imagination, but her gaze seemed to linger on him a moment longer than on the rest of their classmates—before she found herself a seat near the window, hanging her bag on the desk and proceeding to turn her attention outside.

Once again, the whispering commenced. Some of their classmates seemed to find Ayanami interesting by way of mysterious, while others seemed to think her weird-looking because of her abnormal hair and eye color, and still others began writing her off as "frigid" (along with several choice words that Shinji chose to ignore) due to the tone she'd introduced herself with. Shinji still couldn't keep his eyes off her. There was something about her that simply…drew him to her. He didn't know what yet, but he hoped he'd have the opportunity to find out.

Kensuke, meanwhile, watched all this with mild amusement. He thought the new girl was hot, too, but Shinji's reaction to her was far more interesting. He immediately decided that Shinji deserved to make his own attempts for this Ayanami girl's affections. After all, he so rarely expressed an interest in any of the girls their age, and he was being so obvious about it this time that it just had to be something more than simple teenage hormones, and Kensuke wasn't about to do anything to spoil that.

Toji, on the other hand, wasn't nearly so observant. "Man, what's her deal?" he whispered to the still-entranced Shinji from his seat behind him. "Looks like this one's a real ice queen, huh Shin-man?" Shinji, of course, had too much of his attention focused elsewhere to respond, which only served to confuse the burlier boy. "Shin-man? Shinji? Yo, Prof!"

"Huh?" Shinji asked, having finally registered that Toji was saying something to him. "Oh, uh, sure, you can borrow my notes during break." He then returned his attention to Ayanami, leaving Toji to scratch his head in confusion.

* * *

Outside of the new distraction in his class life, the rest of the school day went by relatively uneventfully. Shinji, Toji, and Kensuke left as soon as they were able and headed for the local game store, where Toji ended up using most of his allowance for the month buying Shinji his new game. Shinji, in turn, offered his services as cook/waiter at a private dinner for the jock and Hikari at Toji's place. Toji figured he could get his dad and little sister out of the house for a night pretty easily, especially if he explained the situation, but he still needed a way to keep Hikari distracted for the day while Shinji got things ready. Since they hadn't come up with any ideas for this by the time Shinji had to head home, he just told his friend not to worry about it yet; they had until the weekend to work out the details of the plan, after all.

Once home, Shinji set about getting dinner ready, switching the television on for background noise. He had a few shows he liked to watch, but none of them were on just yet, so he contented himself with listening to the news while he cooked. There was almost nothing in the way of good news, he noted sardonically. There hardly ever was; good news didn't bring in ratings, it seemed.

Shortly before he'd finished dinner, the door creaked open again, admitting Gendo Ikari into the apartment. He and Shinji exchanged cursory glances—the closest thing to a greeting that either of them was usually able to manage—before the elder Ikari took a seat at the dining room table, picking up the morning paper and resuming reading it where he'd left off before going to work at the base. A minute or two later, Shinji had finished dinner, and he began to bring the food and dishes to the table. His father didn't help him at all—he never did, and Shinji had long since stopped expecting it…though he at least made the effort to dish up his own food. "_Itadakimasu_," Gendo said as he folded his hands, the first word either of them had spoken since he'd gotten home. Shinji repeated the gesture a moment later, at which point the two of them began to eat.

"How was school today?" Gendo asked a minute or two later, the newspaper he still had open showing just how much he was actually paying attention.

"It was okay," Shinji replied. He knew, of course, that his father was only asking because it was expected of him, but he didn't object since it was the closest he was likely to get to having a father who actually cared about him.

"Anything interesting happen?"

"Not really, although we did have a new student join us today." This, naturally, brought thoughts of said new student back into Shinji's mind, causing him to space out slightly.

"Oh?" Gendo said, his grip on his paper tightening in surprise. "What was she like?"

Shinji was too busy daydreaming to notice his father's use of a pronoun he shouldn't have known to use, just as he'd missed the crinkling of the newspaper when Gendo had gripped it a little tighter, and he only barely noticed that this was more interest than the elder Ikari usually expressed in his son's day. "She's…quiet, I guess. She spent most of the day staring out the window, and she barely talked to anyone, even when they asked her something." Shinji wasn't really sure what to make of that. Ayanami hadn't exactly been shy in the brief conversations their classmates had tried to start, and while she hadn't really been rude either, her responses had been far more concise than was normal for a girl her age. _Maybe she's even more socially stunted than me,_ Shinji thought, part of his mind wondering how that was even possible.

"Hmm," was all Gendo had to say on the subject. Shinji had heard that grunt enough times in the past to know that their brief father-son time was over. When he'd been younger, he'd tried turning the conversation around and asking his father how work had gone, but the most he'd ever gotten were vagaries like "Things are proceeding ahead of schedule" or "One of our projects hit a slight snag." Usually, he'd just been told "That's classified" and that was the end of it.

Of course, Shinji understood that his father's work was important, but in all honesty, who was he likely to leak any of the Project's major secrets to? Mari? Her mom would likely tell her any secrets Shinji would be privy to before he could blab them himself, even if they had still been on speaking terms.

Hikari? She never seemed interested enough in stuff like that to do more than listen politely.

Mayumi? They never talked anymore, either.

Toji? It was debatable whether or not he'd understand half of what he'd be told about Gendo's work, anyway, or even make the effort to understand the other half.

Kensuke?

…Okay, Shinji could see him being a potential problem. As hardcore as he was about all things military, Kensuke would probably hound him relentlessly if he even suspected Shinji of hiding any juicy secrets about his father's work—most of which would likely end up on any and every chat board the _otaku_ visited within a matter of hours. Fortunately for both of them, Shinji only knew marginally more than the public at large about the true state of the world and the role Project NERV played in it.

Fifteen years ago, a micro-meteor traveling at nearly the speed of light had struck the South Pole, flash-melting the entirety of Antarctica. The gargantuan tsunamis caused by the explosion, along with the massive coastal flooding that followed, resulted in the deaths of more than two billion people in a matter of minutes. The Earth had also been knocked off its axis, locking different parts of the world into various seasons—Japan, for example, was now in a state of perpetual summer—and wreaking havoc on the world's agricultural centers. Global war broke out shortly after what had come to be called Second Impact; some nations began fighting each other over the world's remaining resources, while others simply took advantage of the chaos to renew old ethnic or religious grudges. By the time the Valentine Treaty had been signed nearly five months later, the world's human population had been halved, and thousands of plant and animal species had become nearly or completely extinct.

But humanity as a whole refused to give up and die. Through hard work and perseverance, mankind managed to come back from the brink of destruction, rebuilding the tatters of their society into more or less what it had been before Second Impact, even managing to make impressive technological strides in the meantime. And now, as a testament to human ingenuity and mastery of science and technology, mankind was building a massive mobile space station with which to venture out into the cosmos and, ideally, discover new worlds to colonize in order to secure humankind's place in the universe.

That, at least, was the official party line, and while a great many people knew more than what the governments were telling them, most of the world's knowledge of the purpose behind Project NERV ended there. What they weren't told, though, was just how much damage Second Impact had really caused.

For starters, the world's natural resources were drying up. That in and of itself was no surprise, except that after Second Impact they seemed to have begun drying up faster than before. Massive deposits of oil, coal, and natural gas began to disappear faster than their consumption rate warranted while others simply vanished overnight with no explanation, and while enough remained to keep the world running even up to now, enough of a scarcity had been created to cause a serious shift toward alternative fuel research.

On top of that, the mineral deposits in the soil had also begun to suffer. The massive climate shift Second Impact caused had forced the world to abandon several of its useless former breadbaskets in favor of newer, recently fertile landscapes, but that fertility wasn't lasting as long as it should have. Scientists were doing everything they could to keep the soil fertile, from standard crop rotation to mineral ultra-rich dusting solutions, but while all of it was helping to some degree, none of it was having the effect it should have.

The most dangerous problem, though, was a new chemical compound the meteor strike had introduced into the atmosphere. Dubbed Armisite by some Christian scientist with a sense of humor, the chemical was odorless, tasteless, colorless, and had no direct effect on human physiology. Indirectly, though, the medical profession had noted a slow but steady decrease in the average birth rate ever since Second Impact, and Armisite had been judged relatively early on to be the cause (once it had been detected, anyway). Scientists had devoted much of their efforts to finding a way to eradicate the foreign compound from the air, as well as studying those couples who successfully managed to become parents post-Second Impact in the hopes of finding a solution, but so far results had been minimal at best. Methods had been found to eliminate the Armisite to some degree, but those methods were all either too costly and/or inefficient to be implemented on a global scale or were generally fatal to those involved. As for the post-2I parents, scientists had yet to find any sort of common factor or special immunity to explain their success—as far as anyone could tell, some couples simply "got lucky" while others didn't, and the ratio of lucky to unlucky couples was shifting towards the unlucky side at an alarming rate. The world's governments, meanwhile, were doing what they could to increase the odds in humanity's favor—reduced age of consent, residential and financial incentives for young couples to start families, laws rendering things like birth control, abortions, and homosexuality as varying levels of criminal offense in some countries…Shinji had even heard of more desperate nations instigating enforced breeding programs or more lax definitions of what constituted incest—but again, the effect these measures had on the situation as a whole was marginal at best.

In short, Second Impact had turned the planet itself against its human occupants. Fossil fuels and other natural resources were expected to be completely depleted within thirty to fifty years. The soil's mineral deposits were projected to dry up before the turn of the century. And even if mankind managed to adapt to these adversities, the Armisite saturating the atmosphere was expected to render the human race incapable of reproducing within three to five generations, depending on whose study was being cited.

But while most of the world's leaders and scientific experts had attempted to find ways around these problems, it had been Gendo and Yui Ikari—recently parents themselves—who had presented a more pragmatic solution: if the planet had turned against humanity, then perhaps it was time to abandon it in favor of a new home. To that end, they had proposed the construction of the New Earth Reconnaissance Vessel (referred to by most as NERV-1), a massive mobile colony station (whose residents would undergo the safest Armisite purification treatments available) that would ferry the best and brightest the world had to offer from nearly every field of study, along with a random selection of civilians, on a journey across the cosmos to find humanity a new place to live. Once successful, NERV-1's crew would tie their communication systems into the station's FTL drive (the method supposedly existed, even if Shinji didn't understand the science behind it) and send back word of their success. After that, Earth's remaining population would be transported to their new home by the New Earth Relocation Vessels (NERV-2 and up, as needed), which were being constructed simultaneously with NERV-1 but at a slightly lower priority.

Though viewed as cold-hearted and even unpatriotic by some, Project NERV eventually won the support of the UN. Backed by a small group of wealthy individuals calling themselves SEELE, the project entered full-scale planning in 2003. Shortly into the planning stage, though, Yui was diagnosed with melanoma, and even though she received treatments for it, her condition continued to deteriorate. She continued to work as diligently as possible until the cancer overwhelmed her two years later.

Everything changed for Shinji after that. In the wake of his wife's death, Gendo Ikari became cold, distant, and generally more interested in his work than his son. He was never overtly abusive, and he did what he could to provide for Shinji; he just wasn't there to be a father for the boy when he needed one the most. While the elder Ikari oversaw the project that would hopefully become mankind's salvation, his son was left to fend for himself, forced to find ways to cope with his mother's death on his own (at a far younger age than anyone should ever have to go through something like that, especially alone) in addition to keeping things together at home. He became responsible with his studies because it was expected of him, learned to cook and clean up around the apartment simply because he had to, played the cello in the school orchestra and wrote a few short stories on the side because he'd discovered a knack for them and because they earned him praise from his teachers and classmates…but none of it really mattered that much to him, because none of it got the attention of the one person whose attention he truly wanted.

When Gendo's work took him too far from home for too long, Shinji was left in the care of Misato Katsuragi, a young lieutenant in the NERV Defense Force who was being groomed for the position of Tactical Operations Director. Shinji felt bad for her having to take care of him at first, despite the violet-haired twenty-something telling him repeatedly that she didn't mind the company. After his first visit, though, his opinion of the lieutenant shifted quite a bit. On the one hand, she was incredibly attractive and seemed to enjoy spending time with the younger Ikari, whether it be simply talking, watching TV, or playing games on whichever console Shinji brought with him on any particular visit. On the other hand, she was an incredible slob whose lifestyle made Shinji wonder just how much of a death wish the older woman really had. Her apartment always seemed to be in shambles when Shinji arrived, and her diet consisted almost entirely of snacks, badly-prepared instant food, and beer. Shinji was basically forced to do pretty much all the cooking and cleaning during his stays there, though this was primarily self-imposed as he wasn't sure how long his health or his sanity would last under Misato's normal living conditions. On top of that, she usually pranced around the apartment in short shorts and loose tank tops while off-duty—and while the hormonal part of Shinji's brain didn't really mind this, the rest of him wondered what kind of woman would dress like that with an adolescent boy living in the same space. Their relationship gradually developed from wary cohabitants into a solid friendship heavy on the teasing (mostly on Misato's part, and especially on the subject of girls), but it was only by way of her "private personality" that the lieutenant didn't become Shinji's first crush.

It was also through Misato that Shinji got to know a handful of other members of the NDF. Dr. Ritsuko Akagi, Misato's faux-blonde college roommate, served as the interim head of NERV's technical/scientific branch; the position had been left empty when Ritsuko's mother, Naoko Akagi, committed suicide seven or eight years prior by throwing herself off a ledge and onto one of the three MAGI supercomputers she'd programmed, though Ritsuko was expected to be chosen as her mother's official successor before NERV-1's launch date. Ryoji Kaji, Misato's on-again-off-again boyfriend, currently worked as an operative in Section 2, NERV's security/intelligence department, though Misato often pointed out how likely a candidate he would be for head of that department due to his knack for duplicity and, in her own words, "shoving his nose where it didn't belong." Rounding out the primary bridge crew were Shinji's father, who held the rank of Commander of the NDF; Vice Commander Kozo Fuyutsuki, a former professor at the college Shinji's parents had attended; Makoto Hyuga, a bespectacled private who, despite moonlighting as a secondary operative for Section 2 on top of his bridge duties, wasn't especially subtle about his crush on Misato; Shigeru Aoba, a long-haired techie who also played guitar in a local rock band; and Maya Ibuki, a computer operative trained under Ritsuko herself, though some of her fellow bridge crew had a running bet going as to whether her admiration for Dr. Akagi was purely professional or far more personal than she let on.

Shinji's musings were cut off when he heard his father's chair scraping across the floor as he got up, a further reminder that their time together as a family—no matter how limited or superficial—was over. "I'm returning to work now," he told his son needlessly. "Be sure to—"

"Clean up the dishes, get my homework done, brush my teeth, don't stay up too late, don't burn the place down," Shinji cut in as he started clearing the table, knowing his father's half-hearted attempts at being a real parent by heart. "Yeah, yeah, I know."

Gendo stared at his son for a moment, his expression unreadable as always. For all Shinji knew, his father was seething at his slightly rebellious attitude, or possibly was just surprised by it; then again, for all the emotion Gendo was showing, he might actually have been proud of his son for remembering to be responsible in his father's absence. Even though he'd craved his father's attention and praise as a child, he was beginning to reach the point where he simply didn't care anymore. A moment later, it no longer mattered, as Gendo turned and exited the apartment again, leaving Shinji alone for the rest of the night.

* * *

A/N: I was originally gonna have another school scene after all that, but I think this chapter's long enough. I'll be working on the next chapter of this and Ayanami Chronicles at the same time after this, and unless you guys show a significant interest in one over the other, whichever one gets done first will get updated first. 'Til then!


	2. Interaction

Foreword: okay, so with an overwhelming (for me, anyway) reader response of five reviews (along with a handful of author watches and I don't know how many story favoritings) in a matter of days, I'll be putting my focus toward keeping this fic updated more often than Ayanami Chronicles for the time being. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: see chapter 1.

How Do You Talk to an Angel?

by Elizar Naki

Chapter 2: "Interaction"

Things were still basically the same two days later. Shinji's home life remained in a state of gradual decay, while his attention at school continued to be divided between his teachers and Ayanami. The blue-haired beauty still appeared more interested in the world outside the school than on anything being taught in class, and she still expressed little interest in interacting with her classmates. She was never overtly rude to the ones who tried to start a conversation with her, but she never really did much to keep those conversations going, and she had yet to actually be the one to start a conversation with others. Mari, ever one to heap shame on those she considered unworthy as of late, had created a "Rei Haters" forum on the school's intranet yesterday; the faculty had already shut the forum down and given the twin-tailed girl a warning about using the school's educational resources to defame her fellow students, but Shinji fully expected similar pages to start appearing in the near future.

Ayanami, for her part, didn't seem fazed by this in the slightest. Shinji had yet to work up the courage to actually try and talk to her himself, so he wasn't sure yet if this was because she didn't know about the forum's brief existence or simply didn't care. He suspected the former, since she never seemed to use her laptop terminal much, but from what little he'd seen, he wouldn't have been surprised by the latter, either.

Shinji's musings on the subject were interrupted by a quiet tone from his own laptop, alerting him to an incoming private message. He didn't really need to open the message to know what it would say, but he figured it'd be better to simply get this out of the way, so he opened the message box with only slight hesitation.

**OsakaPwnz: yo Shin-man, u might wanna stop ogling the new girl. u know how Nakamura gets when he thinks were not payin attention**

Shinji couldn't really do anything about the sudden shade of red his cheeks turned, but he tried to play off Toji's teasing as nothing major when he responded.

**IkariS: I don't know what you're talking about. I wasn't ogling her at all.**

**SgtOtaku: oh, don't give us that. We saw you looking.**

**OsakaPwnz: yeah, man, uve been eying her all week. her calves…**

**SgtOtaku: her thighs…**

**OsakaPwnz: her naughty bits!**

**SgtOtaku: her naughty bits!**

Despite the situation, Shinji couldn't help but be impressed by the level of teasing his friends were capable of. It was even more impressive that they'd managed to time their last PMs so closely that his computer had displayed both of them simultaneously. And while they were right about where his attention was focused to a degree, he had no intention of giving them even more fuel for their fun-making fire.

**IkariS: it's not like that, guys.**

**SgtOtaku: ok, then what IS it like?**

**OsakaPwnz: yeah, dude, spill**

**IkariS: I was just wondering why she's always alone.**

**IkariS: she doesn't seem interested in talking to other people at all. I just wish I knew what she was thinking.**

**SgtOtaku: yeah, now that you mention it, she does seem to be off in her own world most of the time.**

**OsakaPwnz: maybe shes just got a lousy personality**

Shinji just let the matter drop there. He didn't really believe that to be the case, but he had no proof and he doubted anything he could say at this point would do anything to keep Toji and Kensuke from teasing him more. Unbidden, his attention returned to the bluenette in question, her gaze still focused out the window she was seated next to. Beautiful though she was, it was her mysterious nature that drew his attention her way so easily. _What's going on in that head of yours, Ayanami?_ he wondered.

"Miss Ayanami!" Mr. Nakamura called out suddenly. Shinji managed to keep from yelping too loudly in surprise, though he felt like he'd nearly jumped out of his seat. He felt bad for Ayanami for whatever was about to happen, but at the same time he was relieved that it wasn't him their Algebra teacher had singled out.

"Yes, sir?" Ayanami answered quietly, seemingly oblivious to the instructor's anger.

"Why don't you come up to the board and solve this problem using the method I just demonstrated?" the teacher asked.

"Yes, sir," the young girl answered, rising from her chair and approaching the board.

Shinji wanted to call out to Ayanami and warn her about what was happening. The problem Nakamura had written on the board was from a higher level of math than what he was teaching them; he did this a lot when he felt like one of his students wasn't focusing properly, using the delinquent student's inability to solve the higher-level problem as a way to humiliate them into paying attention. Unfortunately, Shinji didn't have the courage to warn Ayanami about the truth of the situation, since doing so would redirect their teacher's wrath at him. The rest of the class, however, began muttering among themselves about their teacher's actions—some aggravated by the man's blatant disrespect for them, others feeling that the "ice queen" was getting what she deserved.

Ayanami reached the board and picked up a spare piece of chalk. She stared at the board for a moment, probably trying to figure out what to do, before turning back to the instructor. "I'm sorry, sir," she told him, "but I'm unable to do as you have requested."

"Can't solve the problem, huh?" Nakamura replied with a sneer. "Well, maybe if you were paying attention in class instead of staring out the—"

"Forgive me, sir," Ayanami interrupted, "but I never said I was unable to solve the problem. I'm simply unable to do so under the parameters you set for me."

That got the class's full attention. No one had ever actually talked back to their instructor during one of his "demonstrations." Nakamura himself was rendered nearly speechless. "Wh-what?" he asked a moment later.

In answer, Ayanami returned her attention to the problem on the board, raising her chalk to the board and making slow but steady marks on it. Within a minute or two, she returned the chalk to its tray, having left a series of numbers, letters, and symbols in the space connected to the original problem that none of her classmates understood. Judging from Nakamura's reaction, though, Shinji guessed that Ayanami had not only solved a problem that should have been beyond her, but had also solved it correctly. "I apologize for violating the terms of your request," she told the teacher, "but Calculus is impossible to solve with this level of Algebra. To believe otherwise would be unwise, and to expect otherwise would be unfair." She then walked back down the aisle to her seat, acting for all the world as if nothing major had just happened.

Shinji found himself dumbfounded by what he'd just seen. Not only had Ayanami just stood up to a teacher's unfair treatment of a student, but she'd just proven to have knowledge of Calculus—at only fourteen years old—in the process. The rest of the class's reaction was far more boisterous; the students who'd been muttering about Nakamura's unfair treatment began cheering Ayanami's actions, while the ones who'd been rooting for her humiliation simply stewed when they saw her avoid the shame they felt she'd had coming to her. Hikari, meanwhile, was simply trying to get the class to settle down again so Mr. Nakamura could resume his lesson.

The bell chose that moment to go off, causing the over-excited class to begin scattering for lunch before they'd been officially dismissed. "D-don't forget, class," Nakamura hollered after them in an attempt to retain some semblance of authority, "your assignment for tomorrow is on page 386. And show your work! I'll be giving automatic zeros to anyone who doesn't." That drew more than a few noises of complaint from the students who'd expected to get away with simply copying the answers to the even-numbered problems from the back of the book, but the overall energy of the scattering class was otherwise unchanged.

"Ayanami!" Shinji called out over the bustle of the other students' conversations as they exited the room. He hoped he'd be able to catch her attention before she left too.

Fortunately, she'd managed to hear him over the rest of the class. "Ikari," she said by way of greeting as she turned back to face him. "May I be of service to you in some way?"

"Uh, n-not really," Shinji answered nervously, scratching the back of his neck as he did so. "I, uh, I wanted to tell you how cool I thought it was that you did that a bit ago."

"Did what?" she asked him, looking slightly confused by his statement.

"Umm," Shinji responded, similarly confused by Ayanami's question. As smart as she obviously was, did she really not understand what had just happened? "Ayanami, Mr. Nakamura put that problem up there because he didn't want you to be able to solve it. He was trying to humiliate you for not paying attention."

"Was he?" she asked, looking back at the problem on the board. She sounded as if the thought had never even crossed her mind. "I hadn't noticed."

Given how obvious their teacher's disdain for her had been—especially when he thought he'd had her—Shinji wasn't entirely sure how that was possible. Maybe it was just another sign of her stunted social abilities, he decided. "Um, anyway," he eventually continued, "I was w-wondering if you'd maybe wanna…join me for lunch?" She didn't immediately respond to that, which made Shinji think he'd made a mistake with such a forward-sounding invitation. "I-I mean, Toji and Kensuke would be there too," he stuttered, trying to repair the situation as best he could, "so it's not like it'd be any big deal or—"

"Have you been observing me all morning because you wished to ask me that?" Ayanami cut him off.

Shinji suddenly looked like a deer in headlights. He hadn't realized that Ayanami had somehow spotted him staring at her. He also couldn't figure out just how she'd caught him looking, since she hadn't turned her gaze away from the window until Mr. Nakamura had called out to her, but he didn't see that as anywhere nearly as important as the simple fact that she knew he'd been staring at her. "Umm…I, uhh…th-that is…" he replied, hoping his brain would assemble some plausible excuse for him during his nonsensical stuttering.

"Hey Shin-dude!" Shinji heard Toji's voice calling him. "Hurry it up, wouldja? I'm starvin' over here!" Shinji could see the aforementioned jock waving to him from an adjoining hallway, Kensuke trying his best not to facepalm at Toji's stupidity nearby.

"Your companions desire your attention," Ayanami said, seemingly unaware of the embarrassment she'd unintentionally caused Shinji. "I won't detain you further," she added, turning around again and exiting the room.

"Ayanami, wait! I—" Shinji called after her, but she didn't turn around this time. By the time Shinji peeked around the doorframe, she was on her way around a corner.

"Man," Toji said as he and Kensuke rejoined him near the doorway to their class, "she shot you down good, didn't she, Shin-man?"

Shinji wasn't quite sure what caused him to react the way he did. Maybe it was his embarrassment at how badly he'd handled things with Ayanami, or maybe it was because of Toji's role in driving her off. Regardless, Shinji suddenly found himself wordlessly punching Toji in the arm before stalking off to the stairwell so he could eat his lunch on the roof.

Toji, for his part, just stared after Shinji in confusion. The punch hadn't hurt exactly, but it did sting a little, and he was fairly sure there'd be a small bruise by the next day. "Geez, what's his beef?" he asked Kensuke.

"Y'know," the bespectacled _otaku_ said with a smile, "you really can be as big a lummox as people say you are sometimes." He then took off after Shinji, hoping to be able to repair some of the damage Toji had caused him.

Toji just stood as still as stone for a minute, trying to figure out what everyone's deal was today, before following after his friends.

* * *

Ayanami wasn't in class the next day. Or the day after. In fact, she was absent the entire rest of their first week. Shinji, of course, appeared to be the only one worried by her disappearance, though he did his best to hide that fact in order to avoid his friends' relentless teasing. By Tuesday of the next week, though, his concern over her continued absence had reached the point where he couldn't really hide it anymore. Had she already transferred again for some reason? Was she just avoiding Shinji after their last encounter? Had something happened to her? Had she been hurt somehow?

Fortunately, class had yet to begin, so he decided to talk to Hikari about it. After all, since she was the class rep, she'd be the one most likely to know what was going on. "Hey Hikari," he began when he found her, "can I ask you something?"

"Hmm? Oh hey, Shinji," Hikari greeted him, breaking off from the paperwork she'd been putting together when she noticed her friend's presence. She'd been meaning to thank him for the private dinner he'd arranged for her and Toji's anniversary, but she figured that could wait another minute or two. "What's up?"

"Actually," Shinji began, nervously rubbing the back of his neck, "it's…it's about Ayanami. She's been out for almost a week now, and I'm starting to get a little worried. I don't suppose you have any idea what happened to her, do you?"

Hikari's expression suddenly turned a little guilty. Toji had told her about Shinji's attraction to the enigmatic bluenette, which was part of the reason why she hadn't told him why Ayanami had been absent for so long. "Yeah, umm, about that," she began, trying to figure out just how to tell him the truth, "I do know where she's been…but you're not gonna like it."

Shinji was about to ask what Hikari meant by that when the classroom door opened up, admitting the subject of their conversation into the room. Or what was left of her, anyway. Her forehead was now wrapped in bandages, which seemed to be there partially to support the patch over her right eye. Her arms were similarly bandaged, though while her left arm was only intermittently wrapped up, her right arm was almost completely covered in gauze; her right forearm was also in a cast and was being supported by a sling wrapped around her neck. "Holy—" Shinji blurted out before rushing over to the door. "What happened to you, Ayanami? Are you okay?" It was a stupid question, he knew, but he couldn't help but ask even though he knew his sudden attention to the injured Ayanami was drawing the rest of the class's attention his way.

"I…will live," Ayanami told him quietly, a small measure of pain creeping into her usual neutral tone.

"Well here, lemme get that for you," Shinji told her as he took her bag from her uninjured hand.

"Is there something about my bag that interests you, Ikari?" she asked him, once again sounding confused by his actions.

"N-no, but…you're hurt!" Shinji reminded her.

"My left arm is mostly functional," Ayanami told him, "and my bag isn't heavy. I fail to see the purpose behind this gesture."

"Ayanami, you're hurt," Shinji reminded her again. "You shouldn't have to strain yourself carrying things, even if they aren't that heavy."

"Ikari—"

"Please, just let me help you with this."

"If you wish," Ayanami said with a slight sigh as she began walking toward her desk. She still didn't seem to understand Shinji's point of view, but she wasn't fighting him on it either. Shinji followed a few steps behind her, ignoring the stares and whispers of his classmates as they discussed his unusual behavior.

"By the way," Shinji said as he hung Ayanami's bag on her desk, "you never told me what happened to you."

"I was…in an accident," she told him vaguely as she sat down, grunting lightly as she did so. Apparently, her injuries were slightly more severe than she was letting on.

"Well, what happened?" he asked her. "I mean, was it a car wreck? Did you fall down the stairs? Did—"

"I don't wish to discuss the matter any further at the moment," the blue-haired girl interrupted him.

Shinji was taken somewhat aback by the force in her voice, but he could also understand her reluctance. Whatever had happened, she probably considered it either too embarrassing or too traumatic to talk about just yet. "S-sorry, Ayanami," he apologized. "I just—"

His apology was cut off as the door slid open again, admitting their homeroom teacher into the room. "STAND!" Hikari's voice told the class as she attempted to draw everyone's attention away from Shinji and Rei. "Bow! Take your seats."

"You should return to your desk, Ikari," Ayanami told him once the students had finished their usual pre-class routine. Shinji almost took it as a dismissal, but part of him figured she was simply trying to keep him out of trouble. After all, the class had already seen how bad an idea it was to cross their elected representative when one of them had failed to stay behind on their assigned cleaning day last week—and even without that, Hikari's authoritative temper was legendary enough that even someone as introverted as Ayanami would have heard whispers of it by now.

"Alright," Shinji conceded, "but be sure to let me know if you need help with anything." He then returned to his desk while the teacher did roll call, making sure to keep half an eye in Ayanami's general direction—just in case she didn't let him know if she needed help, of course.

With her gaze already turned out the window, Shinji was unaware of the sudden redness that colored the blue-haired girl's cheeks.

* * *

The next few weeks went by relatively uneventfully. Shinji did his homework and chores as normal, hung out with his friends like normal, and for the most part went about his life the same as always. Ayanami was the only exception. After her return to class, he made sure to make at least one attempt to talk to her every day, usually by way of offering to help her while she continued to recover. Their conversations (one-sided though they often were) tended to revolve around little of any real importance; he never really had the nerve to engage in much beyond small talk with her, and on the rare occasions when he did muster up the courage, it always came too late—for whatever reason, something always interrupted them and caused the blue-haired girl to leave.

Their classes themselves were even less eventful. After the "Calculus incident," as it was being called, their teachers basically left Ayanami alone. It didn't hurt, of course, that she regularly had near-perfect scores in almost every class, so the faculty as a whole seemed to have decided to let her do as she pleased; after all, if her grades were that good when she didn't even seem to be paying attention, and her actions didn't cause trouble otherwise, why go out of their way to make trouble for her or themselves?

The only real incident during that time came one day when Ayanami received a private message as Shinji was asking her yet again to join him and the others for lunch. The message contained a link to an intranet site that, when she opened it, turned out to be another incarnation of the Rei Haters forum—the site's fourth incarnation, if he remembered right. Shinji immediately hit Report and shut the window, hoping that his crimson-eyed crush hadn't seen too much of the site's content. "Sorry about that," he told her.

"Why?" Ayanami asked him, once again seeming confused by Shinji's actions.

"What do you mean 'why?'" he asked her in return, shocked that she didn't seem the least bit concerned by any of this. "These people don't even know you! Doesn't it bother you that they say all these terrible things about you without even bothering to find out what you're really like first?"

"Should it?" she responded.

Shinji hadn't really known what to say to that, so he'd let the matter drop—inevitably leading to her breaking off on her own again rather than join him and his friends for lunch. He'd briefly thought about her question, figuring that she probably just had tougher skin than him. If nothing else, he envied her for that.

Regardless of Ayanami's opinion on the matter, the faculty once again shut down the Rei Haters forum, this time with an announcement accompanying the act. The announcement was generalized, of course, reminding the student body as a whole that using educational resources such as the intranet to defame faculty members or fellow students was strictly prohibited, and that further offenses would result in a one-month suspension from school and permanent suspension of intranet privileges for anyone involved in said offenses. Needless to say, the Rei Haters didn't have a fifth incarnation after that.

The whole incident got him thinking about just how little he knew about what Ayanami was really like, though. He probably knew her better than anyone else in school—he'd begun to notice subtle changes in her expression that would've been full-on emotional outbursts from anyone else, and he'd even started to get the hang of her unusually formal speech patterns—but she'd never shared anything personal about herself with him; anytime Shinji tried to find out something about her personal life, she always managed to either evade the question, give him a vague answer that didn't really tell him anything, or find some reason to break away again. She'd never even told him what really happened during her accident.

All that, he decided, was going to change as of today. Today he was finally going to ask her out.

That wasn't to say he wasn't nervous about the prospect. Truth be told, he was terrified, even if the "date" he planned to ask her out on was just a group outing he and the others were already going to be taking. But as terrified as he was, he'd made up his mind that this time, he wouldn't fail.

A moment later, Ayanami came through the classroom door, her striking form no longer marred by the bandages she'd been wearing for the past month. Shinji briefly considered asking her who her doctor was—if she was already healed from injuries as severe as hers had looked, he definitely wanted the guy's number. He forced himself to stay on track, though, and focus on his goal…even if his heart was beating a mile a minute. _I mustn't run away,_ he told himself as he approached her. _I mustn't run away, I mustn't run away, I mustn't run away…_ "Uh, hey, Ayanami," he greeted her when he got to her desk.

"Ikari," she greeted him as usual. Her cool response nearly smothered his resolve, but he told himself that this was just how she always was and pressed on.

"You're, uh, you're feeling better, I take it?"

"I am well," she told him. "My bandages were removed last night."

"Hey, that's great!" he said. "Oh, we, uh, we got our class pictures back today," he reminded her, indicating the envelope in his hand and the one on her desk. He was rather glad for her that the pictures were taken before her accident; at least she wouldn't have any physical reminder of it now. "W-would you…like to trade pictures with me?"

"For what purpose?" she asked him.

That stopped him for a moment. Did she really not know why kids traded pictures with their friends? "Well, most kids trade pictures with the classmates they like, so…" _Yeah, real articulate, Ikari,_ he berated himself.

"Very well," Ayanami said, reaching into her envelope and removing one of the wallet-size images. It took Shinji a moment for his brain to catch up with the fact that she'd agreed to trade pictures, but he eventually got out one of his own wallet-size photos and gave it to her in return.

"So, uh," he began as he put her picture in his envelope, "I-I was wondering…" He suddenly found his throat turning dry on him, while his palms seemed to have decided to make up for his throat's lack of moisture by sweating profusely. He hadn't even been this nervous the first time he'd been onstage with the school orchestra.

"Yes?" Ayanami asked, waiting for him to continue.

"I, uh, I was wondering…if you'd be interested in going to a movie tomorrow night," he finally managed to say. "I mean, a bunch of us are going," he added nervously. "Me, Toji, Kensuke, Hikari…"

"For what purpose?" she asked again.

"Well, to, uh, to just…hang out and have a good time, I guess," he explained, hoping his answer satisfied her. He wasn't exactly used to having to explain stuff like this. _Just how introverted has this girl been?_ he wondered.

"I see," she said simply. "I apologize, Ikari, but I have a prior engagement tomorrow night that I'm unable to break."

"Oh." Shinji's disappointment felt almost palpable, like something he could reach out and bludgeon himself with if he wanted to. He almost did, considering it would've potentially saved him from the embarrassment of being shot down. "Well, some other time, maybe, if you're—"

"Ikari?" Ayanami interrupted him.

"Y-yeah?" Shinji asked, hoping she'd reconsidered, or was at least suggesting an alternative get-together time.

"Why do you continue to attempt conversation with me?"

THAT, Shinji decided, was a dismissal. As much as he'd simply been trying to get closer to her, she'd finally had enough of him and was telling him to get lost. Shinji took the hint, returning to his desk without looking back at the girl who'd just broken his heart—doing so, he knew, would simply tempt him to try and defend himself and probably upset her even more.

Rei, meanwhile, remained at her desk, trying to figure out why Ikari hadn't simply answered her question. She was curious—and marginally annoyed—enough by this that she almost got up to ask him why he'd left when their homeroom teacher came through the door, initiating the usual pre-class ritual as led by Class Representative Horaki. She decided to simply wait to ask the boy why he'd run off during their next break, taking up her usual position staring out the window as classes began.

* * *

Shinji managed to hold himself together for the rest of the school day, but only by avoiding additional contact with Ayanami. Once school was over, though, he bolted for the door and left his somewhat confused friends behind as he headed home as quickly as his legs would carry him. He knew Toji and Kensuke wanted to hang out after school, but right then he wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and stop existing.

He finally reached his apartment, fumbling for a moment with the key before finally unlocking the door and letting himself in. Once inside, he shut the door again, dropped his bag, and collapsed sobbing into the nearest piece of furniture. Thankfully, that turned out to be one of the rather plush armchairs his father had bought recently; at the very least, he had something comfortable to cry against for the rest of the night. He almost wished he had someone he was close enough to to talk about this with; Hikari was probably the only option, as Toji and even Kensuke were too masculine to be of much help at the moment, but he didn't feel like burdening someone he was only slightly close to with his problems. Misato might've been some help to him as well, but she was probably on duty—or out with Kaji, depending on how their relationship was going that week—and in either case, he didn't want to interrupt her.

"Shinji?" his father's voice asked from behind him. Shinji was momentarily startled by this—he hadn't even heard the door open—but not enough to staunch the flow of his tears. He had no idea how long he'd been crying, but he doubted he'd be stopping anytime soon. "Son, what's wrong?"

That was the last straw. Every ounce of pain he'd felt at Ayanami's rejection, every bit of anger he'd held in from his father's neglect over the years, all of it came bursting out of him in an out-of-control storm that he knew he'd likely regret later but was powerless to stop now. "What the hell do YOU care, anyway? You're never even HERE! You haven't been a FATHER to me since Mom died, so why bother trying now? You honestly think just waltzing in here and acting concerned is gonna make things better? Just go back to your WORK! It's all you really CARE about anymore, right?" He collapsed back into the armchair after that, returning to sobbing uncontrollably as his anger was swallowed up by his sadness again.

Gendo, meanwhile, stood frozen in place in the wake of his son's outburst. He couldn't honestly say that he was surprised by the sentiment; he knew that he was a terrible father to Shinji, that all he ever did was hurt him, that the boy would likely be better off in someone else's care. Rather, it was the fact that his son had actually gone off on him in the first place that had him shocked. He'd never known his son to be anything more than passive-aggressive toward him—toward anyone, really; confrontation wasn't in the younger Ikari's nature, especially not when it came to authority figures. For Shinji to go off like this, something deeply upsetting must have happened to him.

Instinctively, the elder Ikari knew that it must have had something to do with Rei. Ever since she'd ended up as part of his class, Gendo had seen a gradual change in the boy. Nothing overt, of course, but he had noticed that Shinji's general demeanor seemed just a little bit lighter; his attraction to the girl, while unexpected, had served to give him just the slightest boost of confidence. For him to have crashed this hard meant that Rei must have hurt him in some way—unintentionally, Gendo knew, as the girl had no reason to purposefully hurt him, but it was the only thing he could think of to explain his son's current state. And thanks to his poor performance as a father thus far, he was now powerless to help Shinji through this.

Or was he? An idea began to form in his mind, one that was sure to help both his charges…though there was little chance that SEELE would support it. Gendo wasn't terribly concerned about them, though; if all went to plan, the idea would seem to be Shinji's instead of his. And if it didn't…_To hell with the old men,_ he thought as he made his decision. "I'm returning to work now," he told his son.

"FINE!" Shinji shouted into the armchair. "Just leave! That's what you're best at, anyway."

"You will be accompanying me," Gendo continued.

That actually managed to get Shinji's attention. The boy ceased his crying and lifted his head from the armchair again, looking at his father with almost as much surprise as he might if Gendo had told him the Earth was trapezoidal. "Wh-what?" he asked between sniffles.

Gendo merely nodded at his son's confusion. "There's something you need to see."

* * *

A/N: just so you're all aware, I probably won't be updating this quickly on a regular basis (I'd like to, but I don't always have the time). As I said before, though, the sheer amount of responses I've already gotten on this fic surprised me enough that I felt like getting this chapter done as soon as possible. I'll be going back to Ayanami Chronicles after this, though, so expect an update to that relatively soon-ish, hopefully within two or three weeks; once I've got another chapter or two done there, I'll come back and pick this one up again.

Oh yeah, a couple quick addenda to some review replies I sent out:

Greenfang: I forgot when I PMed you regarding your review of the first chapter of this fic that there'd be another semi-dense expositional onslaught coming up in the chapter after this. It should be the last one of this fic (unless my memory fails me again), and hopefully it'll be easier to wrap your head around than the first one was.

Da-Guru: I generally prefer the introverted Rei from the main series and most of the different manga to the RiAO (Rei in Appearance Only) character that shows up in episode 26, Girlfriend of Steel 2, and Angelic Days. Don't get me wrong, RiAO's amusing in her own way, and elements of her might occasionally show up in the Rei I write for in some of my fics, but most of my planned Eva-based works feature Rei behaving closer to her "canon" self.

'Til next time!


	3. Revelation

Foreword: so…THIS took a lot longer to finish than I was hoping it would. I'd love to say that the entirety of the delay has been legitimate (a decent portion has been, with the occasional case of writer's block and a handful of holidays to eat up my time), but the majority of it has simply been because my wife and I (mostly me) have gotten sucked back into a Korean MMO we used to play. Hopefully, this'll be the longest delay I'll have between updates, but I make no guarantees.

On the upside, though, this chapter's quite a bit longer than the previous two, so hopefully that makes up a bit for the delay.

Disclaimer: see chapter 1.

How Do You Talk to an Angel?

by Elizar Naki

Chapter 3: "Revelation"

The Ikaris' trip to NERV's Tokyo-3 base of operations was spent mostly in silence—Gendo because he had little to say, Shinji because he simply didn't know where to start. His father's actions were so radically different from what he was used to, he wasn't even completely sure any of this was really happening, even after having pinched himself a handful of times during the car ride to the linear rail station. Why was his father suddenly acting this way? And why was he insisting that Shinji come with him to NERV? What part of the base's highly-classified operations could the younger Ikari possibly "need to see"? Even as the pair boarded an underground-bound linear rail car, nothing came to the young teenager's mind. _What are you thinking, Father?_ he wondered as the rail car departed.

"I would assume," Gendo said some time later, after the rail car was a good distance underground, "that I don't need to remind you of the necessity for secrecy in much of our work here."

"Y-yeah, I know," Shinji replied. He'd never been on-base before, but the implications of his father's usually terse attitude regarding NERV business told him everything he needed to know on THAT subject: whatever he was about to be shown, he was to discuss it with absolutely no one outside NERV personnel. "But…what's going on, Father? What is it you want me to see?"

"Something…important to your present state of mind," his father told him cryptically.

Shinji was about to ask what that was supposed to mean when their train suddenly emerged from the tunnel they'd been traveling through…and back into wide, open space. That confused the boy enough to make him temporarily forget about his other source of confusion. Had he somehow missed the rail car going back to the surface? That almost made sense, except for the fact that they seemed to be emerging from the sky. Upon closer examination, Shinji noticed that they actually appeared to be traveling into some kind of enormous hemispherical compound dotted by at least one lake and several kinds of plants, many of which he'd never even seen before. The sunset effect, he guessed, was likely being produced by the mirror-like buildings he'd noticed above-ground reflecting the surface light through the windows that appeared to be embedded in the top of the dome. "Oh wow!" Shinji couldn't help but exclaim. "Is this…is this one of the GeoFronts?"

"The original, in point of fact," Gendo clarified. "This one, like many of the others, also serves as one of Project NERV's research and training facilities."

Shinji couldn't believe he was actually getting to see this. The GeoFronts were artificially-created environments that NERV used as test beds for the environmental domes NERV-1 would possess for various recreational and agricultural purposes. In addition, they also served as enormous wildlife and plant life preserves for many of the flora and fauna brought to the brink of extinction by Second Impact. If Kensuke ever got even the slightest inkling that Shinji had been inside one of them—especially the original one—he'd never let Shinji hear the end of it…and for once, the young Ikari wouldn't blame him.

As amazing as the sight was, though, it obviously wasn't what he'd been brought here to see. For one thing, Shinji didn't see what the GeoFront had to do with his "present state of mind," as his father had said. For another, the GeoFront likely possessed some sort of remote observation outpost on the surface, so the fact that they were actually entering it directly meant that what he was going to be shown was somewhere in the base itself. And from the direction the rail car was going, Shinji guessed that the base was inside either the pyramid-shaped structure they were heading towards or the inverted, pyramidal trench next to it. _Won't be much longer 'til I find out, I guess,_ he thought as the train continued on its way.

As it turned out, both "pyramids" were part of the base proper. The linear rail car stopped at a station inside the building portion of it, allowing the Ikaris to disembark as they headed into the base itself. It didn't take long for Shinji to lose track of where they were; there were simply too many doors, side corridors, elevators, escalators, and moving walkways heading off in too many different directions for him to be able to keep tabs on where they were going, or even where they'd come from. Fortunately, his father didn't seem to have that problem, as he strode through the base with practiced ease and purposeful, confident steps. For once, Shinji was actually happy about the elder Ikari's presence, as the chances of him finding his way back on his own were relatively nonexistent at this point.

After nearly a half hour of seemingly aimless wandering, the pair finally came to a halt in front of a rather nondescript door. The door opened to allow them into the room, but only after Gendo had swiped his ID card and entered a six-digit pass code on the security pad next to it. Shinji followed his father inside and found himself in some kind of control room, with computer terminals lining the other three walls at various points and a giant observation port overlooking an adjoining room making up most of the front wall. Privates Ibuki, Hyuga, and Aoba sat at three of the terminals, while Lieutenant Katsuragi stood in roughly the center of the room presiding over…whatever it was they were doing. As the pair of them entered, though, Misato seemed to catch sight of them…or at least of Gendo. "Commander on deck!" she yelled as she came to attention, offering the elder Ikari a crisp salute. The other three quickly rose from their chairs and did the same.

"As you were," Gendo told them after returning their salute.

"Thank you, sir," the violet-haired lieutenant said as she returned to a more comfortable stance, the three "bridge bunnies" taking their seats again in the meantime. As they did so, though, Misato's expression turned confused as she seemed to finally notice Shinji's presence. "Uh, sir, not to question your judgment or anything, but what's your son doing here?"

"Shinji…needs to see this," Gendo told her, as cryptic to her as he'd been with Shinji all night.

"Oh does he now?" Misato asked, a mischievous smile crossing her face and a knowing tone in her voice. Shinji had seen that amused, almost evil glint in her eyes before, and it very rarely meant good things for him. "Well then," she continued as she approached them, "why don't we let our guest of honor watch things from my station?"

"Uh," Shinji began, "th-that's not really—"

"Oh come on, it'll be fun!" Misato told him, simultaneously latching onto his arm and dragging him toward a terminal set along the windowed wall. "Best seat in the house!"

Shinji tried his best to protest, but Misato being quite a bit stronger than him made his efforts pretty much moot. He quickly just gave in and let himself be led over to the older woman's station, taking a seat in front of the multi-screen terminal she normally used. The view, he decided, wasn't that interesting. The room on the other side of the window appeared to be at least two or three stories tall, its surfaces made up of hundreds of blue-white tiles. The view through the monitors wasn't much better, as all they showed were various sections of the adjoining room at different angles and magnifications. The more Shinji saw of this particular operation, the more confused he became by his own presence here. _What could possibly be going on here that Father would want me to see?_

It didn't take long for him to get an answer of sorts. Less than a minute later, a door opened on the far side of the other room, admitting a young-looking girl inside. The girl was clad in some sort of elaborately designed white bodysuit, with matching clips adorning her…blue hair? "Ayanami?" he blurted out before he could stop himself. That just wasn't possible, though. His mind had to have been playing tricks on him, but…no, a quick glance at one of the monitors confirmed that it was indeed Rei Ayanami striding toward the center of the larger room. But…why? What was she even doing here?

Misato's obvious amusement was even further proof that he wasn't imagining things. "You ain't seen nothin' yet, Shinji," she told him with a smile. Shinji wanted to disagree with her—the bodysuit Ayanami was wearing had a "tougher than it looked" vibe about it, but it was also ridiculously skintight, leaving very little of his classmate's slender form to his imagination—but he'd known the lieutenant long enough to know that that would only get him teased even more than usual. Fortunately, she seemed too focused on her present duties to exploit Shinji's embarrassment at the moment. She tapped a button on the clip-on microphone attached to the collar of her jacket, probably patching her through to the room Ayanami was in. "Last chance to back out, Rei," she reminded the younger girl. "We'll all understand if you wanna take a few more days to enjoy being bandage-free again, especially after last time."

_Last time?_ Shinji thought. _What does she mean, "last time"? Was this how Ayanami got hurt?_

"_No,_" the blue-haired girl's voice said over the room's speakers. "_I am ready, Lieutenant._"

"Suit yourself," Misato said, hitting the mic button again to cut the connection. "Aoba, prep for phase one."

"Yes, ma'am," the long-haired private replied as he hit a few controls. As he did, Shinji saw several of the tiles in the adjoining room slide away, revealing dozens of artillery units hidden away inside the walls—all of which quickly oriented themselves toward the room's sole occupant.

"What the—" Shinji exclaimed. "Misato, what's going on? What are you doing?"

"Don't worry, Shinji," Misato reassured him. "Everything's under control. Commence operation on my mark," she added to the other NDF personnel.

Shinji could hardly believe what he was witnessing. Despite the unbelievable things he'd seen over the past hour or so, he refused to believe that Misato—or even his father—would level that much firepower on a fourteen-year-old girl for any reason. There had to be more to this than he was seeing, there just had to.

"Open fire!" Misato ordered, squashing that hope of his before he could even properly latch onto it. A moment later, all that artillery opened up on Ayanami, firing both solid munitions and laser bursts directly at her.

"NOO!" Shinji yelled, turning away from the scene as he got up from Misato's chair. Once again, his anger overrode his better judgment, and he grabbed the older woman by her jacket as he began venting that rage. "What is _wrong_ with you people? What does this have to do with saving the human race?"

"Quite a bit, actually," Misato said with a shrug, acting as if nothing was even wrong.

"You people are SICK!" Shinji continued on his tirade. "She's barely a teenager! How could you possibly expect her to survive having that much firepower leveled at her?"

"Kinda like that," the purple-haired lieutenant said as she pointed back at the adjoining room.

Despite his anger, Shinji found himself looking back at the massacre taking place in the tiled room next to them…and promptly switching from anger back to confusion. Ayanami was still standing in the center of the room, and the wall-mounted weaponry was still firing at her…but none of it was reaching her. A series of hexagonal energy barriers had formed roughly a foot away from the enigmatic bluenette, their citrine tones flashing through a myriad of rainbow colors like soap bubbles in a sunbeam as the various munitions and laser blasts impacted harmlessly against them. Shinji released his grip on Misato, returning to the chair he'd been sitting in as he continued to watch the bizarre scene unfolding before him. What he was seeing wasn't even remotely possible, but he was seeing it nonetheless, and the reactions of the control room's other occupants made it perfectly clear that he wasn't just imagining it all. Just to be sure, though, he pinched himself on the arm again, but like before, the only result was a slight stinging sensation. He wasn't dreaming, either, which meant that all of this was really happening…somehow.

The thought entered Shinji's mind that his crimson-eyed crush might be helping the NDF test some sort of new defense system, but a quick glance at the screens put that idea to rest. Her hands were clasped in front of her chest, her eyes closed in a look of concentration as the energy barrier continued to deflect the incoming attacks. Despite the completely illogical nature of it, Shinji was getting the impression that Ayanami herself was creating that barrier…but how? This kind of thing didn't happen outside of comic books and science fiction shows…or at least that was what Shinji had believed until thirty seconds ago. His confusion mounted when he noticed that she seemed to have something strapped to her hip. He briefly thought that it might be the real source of the barrier protecting her, but after looking more closely he discovered the object to be just a simple glasses case. _Does Ayanami even wear glasses?_ he wondered, finding the thought odd in the middle of everything else that was happening. _And even if she does, why would she have that with her now?_

"Status report," Misato ordered, cutting into Shinji's dumbfounded thoughts.

"Artillery operating at peak efficiency," Aoba reported. "Estimated ammunition usage: 3.7%"

"Biometric readings are all within acceptable parameters," Hyuga added. "No fluctuations detected."

"MAGI have confirmed A.T. Field deployment," Maya said. "Beginning full-spectrum analysis now."

"A.T. Field?" Shinji repeated, baffled by the new term being thrown his way. Behind him, he could hear the door open and close again, presumably admitting someone else into the control room. "Wh-what's that mean?"

"Absolute Terror Field," the newcomer answered him. Shinji turned around and saw Dr. Akagi walking up behind them, a clipboard and a small stack of papers cradled in one arm. Out of the corner of his eye, Shinji could see Private Ibuki's demeanor brighten ever so slightly; assuming he was ever invited to, he had a feeling he knew which side of that bet he'd put his money on now. "It's the term we use for the barrier that holds each individual being's ego together, essentially separating one living being from another. For most of us, that's all it's capable of. For someone like Rei…well, that's what we're here to find out."

_Someone like Rei?_ Shinji mentally repeated. _What's that supposed to mean?_ He was starting to think the whole of NERV's senior staff was having some kind of contest to see who could confuse him the most.

"I must've missed the memo," Ritsuko continued. "If I'd known today was 'Bring Your Child to Work Day,' I would've let Dr. Makinami bring her daughter in. She's apparently been dying to try the flight simulator out."

"The Commander says Shinji needed to see this," Misato informed the bottle-blonde woman with a smile.

"I see," Dr. Akagi answered, her voice filled with that same knowing tone Misato had used earlier. Shinji began to wonder, now that he knew WHY the two women were using that tone, just how many members of NERV personnel knew about his attraction to the pale-skinned…psychic? Mutant? He still didn't have any real idea what was going on, or how Ayanami was creating that barrier of hers. What she was doing in the next room definitely went well beyond just keeping her ego together. "How's she doing this time?" Ritsuko asked a moment or two later, hunching over Maya's terminal to get a better view of the data being displayed on her screens.

"We've got a successful deployment," her unofficial assistant reported. "Artillery penetration currently at zero."

"No surprise there," Ritsuko said, reaching down and tapping a few keys to change the display. "Based on the data available from the Scrolls, as well as what we're seeing here, nothing we've got on this scale can touch her right now unless she lets it."

"Meaning," Misato joined in, "that until we get the enhancers working, we've got about all the new data we're gonna get on Rei's defensive abilities short of dropping an N2 mine on her."

Shinji just listened to the exchange in stunned—and still confused—silence. He recognized the N2 acronym (from one of Kensuke's rants) as the military's term for non-nuclear weaponry that packed as big a punch as nuclear bombs in addition to generating an electro-magnetic pulse; it actually scared him a bit that Misato was even jokingly suggesting that an N2 weapon might be the only thing capable of actually hurting Ayanami when her defenses were up. Most of the rest of their conversation—especially the references to "enhancers" and some sort of scrolls—still made no sense, but he figured they might elaborate a little if he just waited long enough.

"Which ISN'T an option," Ritsuko chided her old classmate. "Assuming N2 weaponry can get past her A.T. Field in the first place, a blast of that magnitude would—"

"Would atomize her, I know," the violet-haired lieutenant interrupted. "Geez, I was just kidding, Rits. Final status?" she asked the others.

"Beam cannons seven through ten and gatling cannon three are showing moderate signs of overheating," Aoba told her. "Shutdown will likely be necessary in two minutes and seventeen seconds. All other weapons operating at peak capacity."

"Field strength still nominal," Maya reported. "No signs of degradation detected."

"Biometrics unchanged," Hyuga said. "Based on the MAGI's estimates, I'd say she can keep this up longer than we can," he added with a slight grin.

Misato couldn't help but return the grin. If nothing else, she knew they had to find some way to keep things light during all this; after all, they were counting on data gathered by putting a barely-teenaged girl in mortal peril to give them a better chance of survival after leaving Earth. "Okay, shut it down. We'll switch to phase two."

"Yes, ma'am," Aoba said again as he shut the artillery in the next room down. On the monitors, Shinji could see the various weapon emplacements retract into the walls, the panels that originally hid them from view sliding into place again.

"Good job, Rei," the soon-to-be Tactical Operations Director told the younger girl over the comm channel. "We've got all the data we need on your defensive abilities for now. Next, we need you to show us what you can do with that Field of yours offensively."

"_Yes, Lieutenant,_" Ayanami replied a moment later.

"Send in the drones," Misato ordered. A moment later, another door opened up in the adjoining room, admitting nearly two dozen humanoid-looking robots—armed with everything from handguns and rocket launchers to swords and other melee weapons—into the room.

"What the heck are those things?" Shinji blurted out again.

"Combat drones," Misato clarified. "The JSSDF began work on them shortly after Second Impact. They never did get them working well enough for the battlefield, but they still have a use of sorts in training ops like this, so the NDF bought a huge batch of 'em early on."

_So robots like this are real, too_, Shinji thought as he observed the increasingly bizarre scene. After everything else he'd seen tonight, he was starting to wonder why that still surprised him.

"Stand by for next phase," Misato said.

"_Ready, Lieutenant,_" Ayanami replied.

"Everything's green on our end," Aoba reported.

"Begin!"

As soon as the lieutenant gave the order, Ayanami braced her feet against the ground, crossed her arms across her chest, and quickly threw them back out again, releasing a horizontal burst of her A.T. Field. The Field sliced through each of the drones' necks, severing their heads and dropping all her potential assailants to the ground in several heaps of useless metal. "Amazing," Shinji breathed.

"All targets have gone silent," Aoba told them. "Elapsed combat time: 1.7 seconds."

"Hmm," Misato said, studying the results of this phase. "Retrieve the damaged drones and send in a new batch. I wanna try that again." To the subject of their tests, she added, "Not bad, Rei, but we're gonna run this one again. This time, though, I want you to focus on using directed strikes instead of that area attack you just did."

"_The purpose of this phase was to eliminate the targets as quickly as possible,_" Ayanami replied quizzically as the damaged drones disappeared into sinking floor panels. "_Did I not do so adequately?_"

"You did, but you have to remember to consider your surroundings too. That burst attack of yours is fine when you're on your own, but most of the time you'll either be working as part of a squad or escorting non-combatants, and you don't want them accidentally getting taken down by friendly fire."

"_Understood, Lieutenant._" As Ayanami responded, new panels slid into position to replace the sunken ones, and a new group of drones entered the room to take the first group's place.

"Second wave standing by," Aoba said a moment later.

"Begin!" Misato ordered again.

This time, the projectile-armed drones were given time to open fire. In response, Ayanami simply jumped—with prowess that would've made most _sentai_ heroes jealous—out of the line of fire. On her way down, she directed herself into a diving kick at the nearest gun-wielder, coating her leg in A.T. energy as she did. The energized kick cut straight through the target drone's torso, shutting it down immediately. Another drone opened fire from behind her, but theyoung combatant pushed off the defeated drone and leapt toward her next target. Shifting her focus, she re-formed her A.T. Field into a pair of crescent-shaped forearm blades running from the tips of her fingers to her elbows, slicing the second drone to pieces with a horizontal strike from one and a vertical slash from the other. As she landed, a third, sword-wielding drone came at her with a downward stroke of its weapon. Ayanami blocked the attack with one of her A.T. blades while shifting the second one into a handheld form, bisecting her attacker with an upward slash.

Shinji couldn't help noticing the severe difference in skill between his classmate and the things she was fighting. Misato had been right: these drones were nowhere near ready for actual combat. They reminded him of pre-Zoe Cylons, programmed for battle but lacking the processing power to react quickly enough to put their programming to any real use. Apparently, testing Ayanami's combat prowess at this point was secondary to seeing how she could use her powers to supplement what she could do naturally.

"Doctor," Gendo's voice cut in for the first time since the tests began.

Ritsuko nodded in reply, responding to some unknown prompt from the Commander. "Are we recording this, Maya?" she asked her protégé.

"Since just before phase one, _sempai_," the younger woman said with a nod.

"Good. Have the recording forwarded to my office when you're all done here; I wanna analyze the whole thing myself later. In the meantime…Shinji."

"Uh…y-yeah?" the younger Ikari replied.

"This way, please," Dr. Akagi told him as she turned and headed for the door, Gendo close behind her. "Your father and I have more to show you."

"O-okay," Shinji replied, getting up and following the two adults out of the room. Just before he left, though, he turned back for a last glance in Ayanami's direction. He was just in time to see her wave her arm and let loose a more directed, cone-shaped version of her A.T. burst attack, taking out three of the remaining drones at once. Shinji still couldn't help but marvel at the young girl's power, but he managed to pull himself away and continue after his father and Dr. Akagi before they got too far ahead of him.

After leading them down another series of twists and turns in NERV's corridors, Ritsuko stopped at another door, swiped her ID card, and entered her own pass code, granting them access to the elevator on the other side. Once inside, another swipe of the faux-blonde's card activated a hidden floor light, taking them down to someplace labeled "TD." Shinji had no idea what that meant, but he was beginning to think of confusion as par for the course around here, so he simply waited for the adults to feed him more information in their own time.

The elevator, as it turned out, was mostly glass, with the door and framework being the only exceptions. The view outside the elevator was dark for the first part of their journey, until the level indicator hit "LE-EE." At that point, the view took on a deep red tint, switching to a lighter, nearly pink shade a few seconds later as the view outside the elevator suddenly turned bizarre. Shinji had no idea what he was looking at, but it appeared to be some sort of collection of enormous biological spheres, filaments, and other unrecognizable structures—almost like the extreme close-up diagram of the human brain his biology teacher had shown his class last semester. It was easily one of the strangest things he'd seen so far—which was saying quite a bit, all things considered.

The elevator's final destination, Shinji guessed, was easily three or four kilometers below ground. The doors opened into a long hallway that was basically a narrow catwalk connected by a series of small pipes and metal framework to some sort of rock-like wall, the only illumination coming from a series of orange lights hidden beneath the catwalk. The three of them walked down the hall for several minutes before coming to a stop in front of a large metal door, another of the now-familiar security keypads embedded in the wall next to it. Shinji could also see some kind of "Keep Out" warning sign (in English, strangely) near the keypad—something about an "LCL Production Plant" and trespassers potentially being fined $100,000 and/or facing up to ten years of jail time…AFTER being shot on sight.

"This is Terminal Dogma," Ritsuko told him. "What you're about to see goes beyond every level of classified information in existence. Aside from the security staff inside and the handful of scientists and technicians whose jobs take them through here, NERV-1's primary bridge crew are the only on-site personnel who know what lies on the other side of this door. If you haven't been sworn to secrecy about everything else you've seen tonight, I'm swearing you to it now…assuming you value your life, of course."

Shinji gulped slightly at the doctor's words but nodded his assent. Whatever his father wanted him to get out of tonight, he dearly hoped it was worth the strain this was putting on his nerves. Ritsuko, meanwhile, seemed satisfied with the boy's wordless agreement and swiped her ID card through the security pad, quickly typing in a multi-digit pass code so long that Shinji couldn't even tell how many digits it contained. Once she was done, the armored door in front of them split into four triangular sections that receded diagonally into the walls; beyond that, another armored door split in half and opened vertically while several glowing red lock bolts retreated shortly behind it, allowing Shinji his first glimpse of the inside of this "Terminal Dogma."

Shinji's first thought, as his jaw dropped nearly to the floor at the sight in front of him, was that the fines posted outside were far too lenient for trespassing on something like this. The room itself was incredibly expansive, with walls that were either jet black or simply too far away for the lighting to make them visible. A massive orange lake dominated the lower part of the chamber, dotted occasionally by various classes of gunboats and warships.

Embedded in the lake was an enormous red cross, with a blubbery white, vaguely human-looking being crucified to it by a pair of huge nails and impaled by an enormous, blood-red bident. The crucified being was wearing an ovular purple mask decorated by seven eyes, an inverted triangle doing its best to connect them all. The being possessed no legs to speak of, though dozens of twitching appendages that could have been human-sized legs seemed to be growing out of its hips. More of the same amber liquid that made up the lake below was flowing down the cross, giving Shinji the impression that the entire lake was actually this creature's blood. "Wh-what the…what the hell IS that?" Shinji exclaimed when he finally found his voice again.

"That," Ritsuko explained, "is Lilith. She's an Angel."

"An…angel?" Shinji repeated. He'd been under the impression that angels were supposed to be winged beings of humanoid size and shape, not something like…THAT. Then again, he also knew that the Bible itself rarely described angels the way people normally thought of them, so he supposed it was still possible for that thing to be one…but if so, what was it doing here? Why would NERV have one locked away in its basement?

"Though technically, she's not really an Angel," the faux-blonde continued. "She's actually one of two types of seed beings. Angels are Adam's spawn, but since the seed beings have powers similar to Angels—"

"Doctor," Gendo cut in.

"…Sorry," Ritsuko told them both. "I sometimes get ahead of myself in matters like these. I'll start from the beginning.

"Billions of years ago, a highly advanced race of intelligent alien beings calling themselves the First Ancestral Race decided that, as the only sentient species they knew to exist in the Milky Way, it was their duty to sow the seeds of life all across the galaxy. To that end, they began creating two different types of seed beings, which were then sent out to create life on the planets they were sent to. The first type was called the Fruit of Life type, or Adam type; these seed beings created the Angels, creatures with immense strength and physical powers, often similar to various _tokusatsu_ monsters. On the other hand, the Fruit of Knowledge seed beings, like Lilith here, created offspring that were far smaller and less powerful but more numerous and clever, forming a balance of sorts with their counterparts—the Angels had incredible power, but the various races of the _Lilin_ would be the first to develop science and civilization."

Shinji had all sorts of questions he wanted to ask already, and even though some of them (in particular "How the hell do you know all this?" or "What does any of this have to do with me?") were probably more important, he picked the one that was at the forefront of his mind. "So…what happened if an Adam type and a Lilith type ended up on the same planet?"

"They didn't," Dr. Akagi told him. "The First Ancestral Race—or Progenitors, as we usually call them—knew that, if any one race possessed the power of both the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Knowledge, it would put them on par with the Progenitors themselves, and they were afraid of what would happen if that sort of power was abused. To keep that from happening, they calculated the trajectory of each seed being's transport ship, or Moon, with painstaking attention to detail, making absolutely certain that no two seed beings ever ended up at the same place. In addition, they paired each seed being with a sentient control spear—like that big red bident up there—designed to place its life-bearing partner in a state of suspended animation in the unlikely event that some random anomaly caused an Adam and Lilith type to ever end up on the same planet. And, in the event that all else failed, the two classes of seed beings were programmed with a genetic-level hatred for one another, which they would then pass on to their progeny in order to ensure that Adam- and Lilith-based life would never be capable of working together and sharing their respective Fruits with each other."

"Oh," Shinji said. "So, umm, how do you know all this? I mean, if this all happened billions of years ago…"

"In a sense, the Progenitors themselves told us," Ritsuko continued. "Shortly after Project NERV was accepted by the UN and entered the initial planning stage, an archeological expedition here in Tokyo-3—or Hakone, as it was still known at the time—stumbled across Lilith's Black Moon-class transport, which had apparently crash landed on Earth when it arrived. They found Lilith still alive, but only barely, her control spear missing. They also found documents, called Dead Sea Scrolls by the higher-ups, that detailed much of the Progenitors' work—once we figured out how to translate them, anyway, which turned out to be surprisingly easy. In any case, an item matching the control spear's description was found a short time later, thus allowing us to put Lilith in stasis and preserve her life. In the meantime, this GeoFront base was constructed inside the Black Moon, and teams were dispatched to study the Scrolls as well as Lilith herself, leading to the creation of new scientific fields like metaphysical biology as well as breakthroughs in numerous other fields, including wave-particle duality."

_The GeoFront is INSIDE an alien ship? _Shinji thought. _Just how big IS this place?_

"Of course, as with most scientific breakthroughs, the inevitable question of military applications came up pretty quickly. In this case, though, figuring out ways to use our new knowledge to defend ourselves is likely to be more necessary than usual. From what we were able to learn from the Scrolls, it seems pretty likely that the Angels will have evolved into their own space faring society by now, making it entirely possible that our travels will throw us into the middle of an Angel-_Lilin_ war—and even if that isn't the case, our odds of running into an Angel-inhabited planet somewhere along the lines are still basically 50-50."

"S-so…have you figured anything out?" Shinji asked.

"A few things," the faux-blonde doctor told him. "For starters, there's Lilith's blood—the lake you're standing in front of. We call it LCL, or Life Component Liquid, since it's what Lilith used to create all life on Earth. We've also discovered that LCL has some remarkable properties. For one thing, submersion in it won't cause a person to drown—rather, the LCL will supply the submerged person's lungs with oxygen itself. In addition, if charged with an electrical current, LCL will undergo a phase shift; it remains in a liquid state, but its density, opacity, and viscosity seemingly approach that of normal air. Lastly, LCL allows for an unusual bond between pilot and mecha, which has led to the invention of the entry plug system. Essentially, entry plugs are transplantable cockpits that can be inserted into any compatible mecha, with each plug calibrated to a specific pilot. Once inserted, an entry plug is filled with LCL, allowing the mecha's systems to register the pilot's brain waves and convert them into movements more precise and complex than standard controls alone could ever realistically manage. This makes piloting compatible craft far easier, and it allows us to create humanoid mecha to use as well."

"Amazing," the young boy breathed.

"It is indeed, but it may not be enough, given what we've discovered the Angels to be capable of. Fortunately, the Scrolls seem to indicate that both types of seed beings possess abilities similar to the Angels'—but with Lilith too weakened to even regenerate herself properly, she's hardly in a position to help us out. To that end, our scientists came up with the idea to mix human DNA with Lilith's in order to create a humanoid being with powers comparable to the Angels. The being would also serve as a new vessel for Lilith's soul, though damage it sustained over the centuries forced us to use what little we knew of metaphysical biology to artificially supplement it. The whole thing was dubbed Project Nephilim, though most of us here just call it the Ayanami Raising Project."

"The—" Shinji was far too shocked by that little tidbit of information to even repeat it properly. His ears had to have been playing tricks on him; Dr. Akagi couldn't be telling him what he thought she was. Sure, his classmate apparently had some kind of super-powers, but that didn't necessarily mean that…

"The original plan was to create a whole army of super-soldiers this way," Ritsuko continued, "and once we figured out how to create a viable clone, mass-producing them was relatively easy. Unfortunately, since Lilith only had one soul and our knowledge of how to create or divide souls is practically nonexistent at present, all our attempts to activate other clones using soul fragments, purely artificial souls, or even no souls at all were…disastrous, to say the least. As a precaution, the remaining clones were destroyed, and Project Nephilim's focus was shifted to simply training the one successful clone we had."

"Y-you're saying that…that Ayanami is…is…"

"The person you know as Rei Ayanami," Ritsuko filled in for him, "is actually an artificially-created hybrid, housing Lilith's own soul inside a body created by combining a sample of Lilith's DNA with DNA samples from nearly two dozen human donors—including one from Yui Ikari."

"MY MOTHER!" Shinji exclaimed. That certainly added a new dimension to things, but it wasn't one he particularly liked; it was one thing to find out that his crush was half alien and had an array of inhuman abilities to match, but this…he wasn't sure he could deal with just how Oedipal he felt at the moment.

Ritsuko, on the other hand, seemed to find his reaction amusing. "Don't worry, I already had this talk with your father a month or so ago, so I'll tell you the same thing I told him.

"Quite simply, Shinji, bioengineering is far from an exact science. Cloning of any sort, especially human cloning, is even less exact, and human-alien hybridization…well, let's just say we were lucky to get any results at all there. Rei's genetic code is barely cohesive at this point, in all honesty. When she was first created, she nearly fell apart at the seams; we had to devise a special medication for her to take on an hourly basis just to keep her in one piece. That need has fallen to once daily at the moment, and at the rate her cellular structure is solidifying, we figure she'll be done with the medication within a year or two.

"As for her creation itself, we discovered early in the process that Lilith's DNA is highly morphogenic, ridiculously unstable, and strangely...picky, I suppose you'd say. When we fed it one human sample at a time, it outright rejected most of them—and with the ones it didn't reject, it only took in a fraction of the sample before throwing out the rest. We not only had to find a way to merge Lilith's DNA with multiple human samples, we had to figure out what combination of samples would give us a viable final product. With how illogical Lilith's samples seemed to be at times, your mother's inclusion in the final product was hardly surprising; given how much time Yui invested in this project before her death, Lilith probably felt some sort of bond with her that transferred over to the attempted cloning process, though I can't even begin to guess how that would work. Regardless, Lilith's sample absorbed Yui's basic appearance and vocal timbre, along with a few mannerisms here and there, when we fed it a sample of her DNA. In the meantime, we found a combination of additional samples that worked—and when we put them all together, the whole mess morphed itself into a completely original genetic pattern, with few traces of the original donors.

"In short," Dr. Akagi finished, noting the boy's bewildered expression, "Rei's genetic structure doesn't contain enough of your mother's DNA to make your infatuation with her incestuous. Freudian maybe, but not incestuous."

Shinji was quiet for a long time after that, partly because he was still trying to figure out if the older woman's explanation made things better or not; if nothing else, though, it confirmed his suspicions that at least a few members of NERV knew about his feelings for his nephilim classmate, including his father. For the most part, though, he was still trying to take in everything he'd seen and heard in the last hour or two; he briefly wondered just when the channel of his life had gotten changed, dropping him out of his usual teenage soap opera and into this bizarre sci-fi program. "So…these tests you've been running on her…you're trying to figure out what she can do with her powers?"

"For the most part," Ritsuko confirmed. "We've been testing her in one way or other since she was created, and we've managed to learn quite a bit. We're still not sure if her well-above-average mental capabilities are due to her Lilith side or the fact that at least half of her human donors had genius-level IQs, but we HAVE determined that all of her physical abilities—strength, speed, agility, resilience, you name it—are well beyond what someone her age and size should be capable of. She's also immune to most, if not all, diseases, and she seems to have a knack for understanding and replying in any language we throw at her, orally or in written form, without trying. We've also determined that her S2 organ allows her to go for far longer than normal without food or hydration—weeks, according to our data, if not months—as well as granting her superhuman regenerative powers."

"S2 organ?" Shinji asked.

"Super-solenoid," Ritsuko explained. "It's a special organ that Angels and seed beings have. It's what gives them their powers, along with the energy to use them. In Rei's case, her S2 organ is where a normal human's appendix would be. We figured a vestigial organ that's prone to causing problems when it's left in would be a decent thing to sacrifice."

"Oh," Shinji said, his mind shifting to something else Ritsuko had said and combining it with a comment Misato had made in passing earlier. "Ayanami's regenerative abilities…that's how she healed so fast after the last test of her A.T. Field powers, isn't it?"

"You don't know the half of it," the doctor told him with a smirk. "Rei had that eye patch on because her eye was completely destroyed. Her cast was there to help her broken bone heal, but it was also there to hide just how much of her arm had actually been blown away."

"O-oh," Shinji said. Ritsuko was right; if Ayanami could heal herself from THAT kind of damage, he hadn't had any real idea of just how much she was capable of. "So, I get that you need to see just what she can do and all, but…was that get-up you had her in before really necessary?" Despite himself, he still couldn't help but blush at the recollection of just how skintight that bodysuit of hers was.

"That 'get-up,' as you call it, is what our pilots wear," Ritsuko explained. "The plugsuit helps cut down on interference during pilot-mecha synchronization, as well as including functions like a defibrillator, basic medical monitors, and a power display linked to the mecha currently in use; the interface headset increases the strength of the neural connection while also allowing us to monitor the pilot's biometrics and such more closely. For the purposes of this test, the plugsuit's skintight nature allows us to more readily study Rei's movements during playback, while the interface headset lets us keep an eye on her mental stability during testing. It may seem a little odd on the surface, but we'll need every bit of data we can get if we plan to replicate her powers."

"Replicate?"

"Yes, replicate. That's the other reason we're currently subjecting Rei to these tests: so we can use the data we obtain to hopefully create artificial A.T. Field enhancers that will allow the rest of the NDF access to powers like hers. As you saw before, very little of the weaponry we possess is capable of getting past an A.T. Field of that caliber, but our research leads us to believe that the use of another A.T. Field of similar strength would be able to neutralize an opponent's Field—and since the Angels all possess A.T. Field abilities at least marginally similar to Rei's, it would greatly increase our odds of survival if more of us than just her could fight back against them."

Shinji wasn't entirely sure how much that would really help. Unless the Angels' evolution had brought them down to human size from the Godzilla-esque proportions Ritsuko was implying them to have, he doubted anything short of a full army of A.T. Field-armed soldiers, or an A.T. Field-equipped mecha of some sort, would be capable of subduing even one of them. For the time being, though, he chose to believe that the adults knew—at least mostly—what they were doing. "So, Ayanami's Angel side…is that why she seems so…in the dark about so many things?"

"No," his father answered. "Though that is a contributing factor, most of her social ignorance stems from SEELE's interference in the project." He turned to leave as he spoke, preceding the other two in exiting Lilith's chamber.

"SEELE?" Shinji asked, hastily following his father back down the hallway outside, Dr. Akagi strolling along leisurely behind them after closing the chamber door again. "You mean those old rich guys that are backing Project NERV? How do they have anything to do with Ayanami?"

"SEELE is far more than just a bunch of old men with a lot of money," Ritsuko explained. "They're a secret society that dates back far longer than any of us have been alive. They've supposedly had background-level control over just about every major government and military organization in recorded history, and while we have no real way of confirming that, we do know that they're essentially the true power in charge of the United Nations."

"The members of SEELE believe that their…influence allows them to do as they please," Gendo continued, "and in many ways they are correct. Their influence allowed Yui and me to gain approval for Project NERV far faster than we normally could have, though their support likely only came because of her involvement in their society."

"Involvement?" Shinji asked. "You mean Mother was part of SEELE?"

"Correct. I'm…ashamed to admit that this was my original reason for associating with her, though my affection for her quickly became genuine after I got to know her. In any case, SEELE has been interfering in one way or another with our work here for some time. That interference is generally tolerated, but I fear it may have irrevocably harmed Rei's development this time."

"What do you mean?" Shinji asked, ignoring his father's implication that his late mother was involved in this secret society they were talking about.

"When Rei was created," Gendo began, "she had the appearance of a five-year-old girl; nevertheless, SEELE saw her as little more than a weapon, a tool to be exploited to further their own goals. They cared only for what her Angel side could accomplish; her human side, it seemed, was irrelevant to them. She was confined here in this base for much of her life, allowed interaction with others only during her various types of training—and even that was monitored and restricted to avoid her becoming 'contaminated' by human emotion. I've spent much of the nine years since her creation protesting this decision, as have several others involved in Rei's upbringing, only to be ignored each and every time."

The trio had reached the elevator by this time, giving the Commander a moment's pause as the doors opened to allow them back inside. Shinji just waited mutely as the doors closed and the elevator commenced its journey back to the "official" portion of the base, angered and confused by what his father was telling him. How could SEELE be that cold-hearted? How could they treat Ayanami like just a…a THING?

"Recently, though," Gendo continued once they were on their way, "SEELE made a concession on this point, but that concession is far from good enough. They have moved Rei from her living quarters here to an apartment in the city, and have allowed her admission in Tokyo-3 First Municipal Middle School in order to allow her to learn about human interaction from her peers. NERV personnel, however, are still forbidden to help her in any way regarding the development of her human side. The old men fail to see that, as underdeveloped as her social abilities are at this point, she stands little chance of learning how to interact with others in such a socially complex environment."

_So THAT'S why Father really brought me here,_ Shinji realized sadly. He felt more than a little angry at his father for this, bringing him here and manipulating him into this position…but he was more angry at SEELE for making his father's actions necessary. Even so, part of him had hoped that he'd been brought here for his own benefit and not someone else's. "Then…then let me help," he finally said.

"What?" Ritsuko breathed, surprised by the boy's reaction. She could see the Commander's barely-concealed look of satisfaction off to one side, enlightening her about the true nature of Shinji's reason for being here. She had to admit that it was a shrewd move on the elder Ikari's part, even if it was a bit underhanded.

"I said I want to help her," Shinji clarified. "After all, I'm not part of NERV personnel, so I can help her learn to understand her human side without SEELE interfering, right?"

"Presumably," Dr. Akagi said, still sounding a little dubious about the idea. "But...this is a huge responsibility you're asking us to give you. Are you sure you're up to it?"

"Not really," the younger Ikari admitted, "but…there's really no choice, is there? Nobody here is allowed to help her, and nobody else at school even knows she needs this much help—heck, most of them probably wouldn't help her even if they did know what was really going on with her. That just leaves me, so…if it'll help Ayanami, I'll do whatever I can."

"That's certainly gallant of you," Ritsuko told him, the smirk returning to her face, "but I'm afraid the decision isn't ours to make. We could order Rei to let you teach her, but aside from SEELE likely viewing that as us interfering, it would be better for her in the long run if she made the decision herself—which means we can't get involved. You'll have to find a way to get her to accept your assistance on your own."

_Great_, Shinji thought, not really liking his chances at that. He barely knew how to make inconsequential small talk with her; how was he supposed to talk to her about something this serious?

"If nothing else, though," the bottle-blonde continued, "we can at least set the stage for your discussion." Strictly speaking, of course, that fell under the heading of interference too, but she figured it wouldn't be hard to come up with some excuse or other to get the two children talking. Tapping the microphone control clipped to her labcoat's lapel, she continued, "Lieutenant Katsuragi, this is Dr. Akagi. Would you mind holding Rei for a little while longer? We need to discuss something with her."

"_Uh, this is Private Hyuga, Doctor,_" Makoto's voice answered her. "_The lieutenant's already checked out for the evening—said something about leaving the data analysis to those of us who knew what we'd be looking at._"

"That sounds like her," Ritsuko said with a slight sigh. "Is Rei still there, at least?"

"_Sorry,_ _but the security logs indicate that she left the base about ten minutes ago, same time as the lieutenant._"

"I see. Thanks anyway, Private." Ritsuko cut the channel, turning her attention back to the Ikaris. "Looks like she's already left the premises. You'll have to wait until you see her again at school to talk to her about this now; calling her back would look too suspicious."

"Th-that's alright," Shinji told her as the doors opened on the base's ground floor (so to speak). "I could use a little extra time to figure out how I'm gonna go about this, anyway."

"In any case, Doctor," Gendo said, "Shinji and I should be going, seeing as he still has schoolwork to attend to in addition to this new responsibility. I should be back to assist in the analysis of the data from tonight's tests within an hour or two."

"Don't be too long," Ritsuko told him with a smile. "Otherwise, I might start without you."

"If you wish," the Commander replied. "I'm sure I'll be able to catch up when I return." With that, he turned and led his son back through the base's maze of corridors.

_As cold as ever,_ Ritsuko thought as she watched him leave. _Except where his son and that little doll of his are concerned, anyway._ She turned and stalked down the halls to her office, doing her best to fight down the anger that particular thought brought on.

* * *

The Ikaris' trip back from NERV was about as quiet as the ride there; this time, though, Shinji's mind was filled with thoughts of how to deal with what he'd seen over the past hour or two. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting to happen tonight, but some small part of him was disappointed to learn that everything he'd been shown was for someone else's benefit. To some degree or other, he'd been hoping that his father had actually been acting with the intention of helping his own child rather than advancing another aspect of his project; he'd definitely be sure not to make that mistake again.

In the meantime, he needed to figure out how to go about earning Ayanami's trust. Given the dismissal he'd endured earlier that day, he likely had his work cut out for him even more than he normally would have; even under the best of circumstances, he doubted that just walking up to her and asking how the half-alien thing was going would end up working in his favor. Passing her a note was out of the question, since the odds of interception were just too great to risk. Sending her an IM would normally have been his method of choice, but even that was too risky now that the school faculty was monitoring everyone's computer usage more closely than ever; he blamed Kensuke for that, since it was the bespectacled _otaku_'s actions that had caused the security increase. He supposed he could always try sending her a vaguely-worded IM so nobody else would know what he was really saying to her, but there was too much chance of her misinterpreting his message for him to consider that a viable option. That brought him back to the standard face-to-face method of conversation—which, of course, was his least effective method of communication. _At least I've still got the rest of the night to figure this out_, he thought.

"If there's any way I can help you with this, just let me know," his father said after a few minutes of driving.

"Thanks," Shinji replied absent-mindedly, staring out the car window while basically ignoring the elder Ikari's offer, "but from what you guys were saying earlier, it sounds like I have to do this alone."

"If you wish. The offer stands if you change your mind, though."

"Hmmph, sure," Shinji muttered, not really buying his father's sudden interest in helping him with Ayanami. _Ayanami...wait a minute... _"Ayanami...that was the name of one of our old warships, wasn't it?"

"You know your history," Gendo replied, obviously impressed. "The _Ayanami_ was the namesake for a class of heavily-armed destroyers used during World War 2. Given Project Nephilim's overall purpose, the name was chosen early on as an appropriate surname for her."

"So...where did...the rest of her name come from?"

Gendo seemed to turn pensive for a moment, taking longer than Shinji would've expected to answer. "Rei was...the name your mother and I would have used...if you had been born a girl."

"I see," Shinji said, bitterness welling up in him again. "So Ayanami's been your surrogate daughter all this time." _While you ignored your real child,_ he added mentally.

"In a sense," Gendo admitted. "I have come to care for her well-being over the years, and I wish to see her happy. That's part of the reason why I brought you along with me tonight: because I knew you would be both willing and able to assist us in this endeavor."

"Hmmph," Shinji grunted again, getting more and more upset by this conversation by the moment. "And the rest of it?" he asked mechanically, not really caring about his father's motives anymore.

"...It was the only way I could think of to keep you from crying more," his father finally said, surprising Shinji with just how...concerned he sounded. "I doubt you would have believed me if I'd simply told you that she didn't mean to hurt you, that there was more to the situation than you knew."

"Wait, how did you..." Shinji began, trying to figure out how his dad knew why he'd been crying.

"Call it...parental intuition," Gendo said simply.

Shinji wasn't entirely sure what to make of that. If nothing else, it seemed like his father's "parental intuition" was somewhat hit-and-miss. After all, how could Ayanami NOT have known that telling him to get lost like that would hurt him? Unless..._"Why do you continue to attempt conversation with me?"_ That had been her exact wording, and at the time Shinji had believed it to be another of the girl's unusual phrasing choices. Now, though, he was beginning to think that Ayanami had simply meant the question literally, that she'd been asking him why he was still making efforts to talk to her when nobody else did. Given what he'd learned about her tonight, the possibility seemed pretty likely, but he still figured it'd be a good idea to plan out how he was going to talk to her about helping her under the assumption that she still didn't want him around—if anything, planning for the hard route meant he'd have an easier time of it if Ayanami didn't actually want him out of her life.

"Well I'm glad YOU at least have faith in me," he told his father after a bit. "Personally, I'm terrified by all of this. I don't think I'm cut out to be responsible for another person's well-being like this. I mean, if I mess this up, Ayanami might never figure out how to really be one of us."

"But you still plan to try anyway," Gendo replied, halfway between a statement and a question.

"Well...yeah. I mean, like I said before, there's really no one else who can—and WILL—do this, so...for her sake, I have to try."

With his gaze still out the window, Shinji couldn't really see the smile that suddenly came to his father's face. "I'm proud of you, Shinji," he said after a moment. "You're becoming a very brave young man."

"Yeah, right," Shinji said, ignoring his father's attempted compliment. "I just told you I'm scared out of my mind by all of this. Some brave young man I am."

"True bravery isn't an absence of fear," the elder Ikari told him, "but the resolve to do what is necessary in spite of that fear."

"What fortune cookie did you get that bit of advice from?" Shinji muttered.

"Yui attempted to teach me that," his father corrected him, "just before she died. I'm sorry to say that I failed to truly learn that lesson...though I doubt I really need to tell you that."

Shinji couldn't help but be surprised by that little admission. Given the line of work his father was in, the boy could only think of one thing the elder Ikari could have meant by that. "You mean...you're afraid of me?"

"Of my responsibility to you, yes," Gendo corrected him again. "My own parents were hardly what you would consider good role models, so I had no real idea how to be a good father to you. Yui always managed to pick up after my mistakes, but after she died...I didn't know how to handle the thought of raising you alone. I was certain that anything I did would just hurt you."

"So you all but abandoned me?" Shinji asked. "You left a four-year-old boy to fend for himself in the wake of his mother's death?"

"I won't call what I did logical, or even right," Gendo admitted, "but I was hardly thinking clearly at the time, and it seemed like the best option. It wasn't until some time later that I realized just how much damage that decision did to you. But while I wanted to find some way to undo the pain I'd caused you, I believed you to have become too resentful toward me to accept any sort of apology I might have made...so I continued on as normal, and allowed you to keep hating me."

"Dad..."

"I know I've been a terrible parent to you, Shinji," Gendo continued, "and I know I've likely missed my chance to make things right...but if you're willing, I'd like to ask for your forgiveness for all the pain I've caused you, as well as the chance to make it all up to you."

"Dad..." Shinji could hardly believe what he was hearing. His father, the man who'd earned the title of "bastard king" from his own son, was actually admitting to being a bad parent? AND he wanted to try and fix things? The younger Ikari wasn't entirely sure whether that particular development was more or less bizarre than learning that his crush was a half-alien clone. "You know, this isn't something you can make go away with a simple apology. I mean, you hurt me...a LOT. You can't expect me to just forgive and forget that easily."

"I'm aware of that, Shinji," Gendo replied sadly.

"But...if you really mean what you're saying...if you really wanna try and fix things...then I guess I'd be willing to give it a shot, too."

Gendo merely nodded in reply to that. His son's response wasn't as enthusiastic as he'd been hoping for, but it was still more than he'd realistically expected.

The remainder of their trip back to the apartment complex was once again spent in silence, though this time it wasn't quite as uncomfortable as it had been earlier. When they finally arrived home, Shinji got out of the car, though he wasn't entirely surprised by the fact that his father didn't seem to be joining him. "You're still going back, aren't you?" he asked through the still open door.

"Unfortunately, I have little choice," the elder Ikari told him. "Too many things still require my attention. I could delegate at least a few of them to Fuyutsuki, but—"

"It's fine," his son interrupted. "Your work's important, I get that." For once, Shinji wasn't hurt by his father's departure, and he actually understood that statement on more than just an intellectual level. He'd hoped for a chance to begin their attempted reconciliation, but he knew there'd be time for that later. For now, both of them had other things they needed to focus on first.

"You have my cell number if you need me?"

"Mm-hmm," Shinji replied with a nod, which his father answered with one of his own. A moment later, the younger Ikari shut the car door again, making his way back to their apartment as his father headed back toward the linear rail station.

* * *

Several hours later, Shinji lay awake on the futon in his unlit room, staring up at the picture he'd gotten from Ayanami earlier in the day in the hopes that it would help him figure something out. He'd spent the evening making and eating a light dinner, cleaning up a bit, finishing what little homework he'd been assigned, and watching a few of his pre-recorded shows, all while attempting—and failing—to come up with a way to talk to the crimson-eyed girl about her situation. On top of that, he still didn't really know how to go about teaching her about her human side even if he did find a way to convince her to let him try. He'd eventually gone back to his room and laid down, starting up his mp3 player (a rare SDAT-brand model his father had gotten him for Christmas a few years back) to try and calm his mind a bit. Now, said player lay a little ways away, the music it produced only faintly audible now that its headphones were no longer in his ears; Shinji could barely make out the tune of some pre-Impact power ballad he couldn't quite identify, though he wasn't exactly putting a lot of effort into it since most of his focus was elsewhere.

"Rei Ayanami," he said aloud, hoping that saying her name would somehow give him some burst of inspiration. Not surprisingly, it didn't help. "How do I get her to trust me with something this important?" At the same time, though, he noticed the somber expression on her face, and he couldn't help but realize that he'd never once seen her smile for anyone. "How do I get her to smile for me?"

"_How do you talk to an angel?_" the song on his mp3 player asked, seemingly in response to his own query. "_How do you hold her close to where you are?_"

"How indeed?" Shinji asked with a trace of amusement, noting how the song seemed to mirror his own situation. The difference, of course, was that the "angel" in the song was only the figurative type; Shinji, meanwhile, was faced with the real thing, along with the prospect of trying to talk to her about something more important than his own romantic feelings for her. For the time being, though, he set Ayanami's picture down and decided to simply let the matter go for the evening, feeling too tired—physically, mentally, and emotionally—after the day's events to put any more thought into the matter until after he'd gotten a decent night's rest.

His last thought as he drifted off to sleep was that, at the rate he was (or, more accurately, wasn't) coming up with ideas, trying to catch a falling star might actually be easier.

* * *

A/N: I feel the need to make a few shout-outs regarding some of the content of this particular chapter. I'll start with Lucythebeast, whose fic "Only in Your Eyes Am I Worthy" (seemingly abandoned one chapter from completion) gave me the idea for a different location for Rei's S2 organ. From there I'll move on to funvince and Ryan Xavier, whose fics "Life Goes On" and "An Unwilling Angel" (respectively) helped me create an origin for Rei that retained the spirit of her canon origin while removing the implications of incest Anno tried to give that particular pairing (I personally don't believe he totally succeeded, if you analyze the evidence closely enough, but that's a different discussion). And, as always, one to my wife for being kind enough to beta-read my work and point out any potential problems with it.

As for my decision to give Shinji an mp3 player: I came up with that idea before Rebuild 2.0 was released, so at the time I didn't know the real reason Shinji seemed to cling to such an outdated piece of technology; after all, as someone who's usually a little below the technology curve myself, even I had a CD player in the mid-90s, and it baffled me that Shinji, in 2015, would still be using a cassette player. So I decided to meld the two ideas, giving him something technologically current while retaining a reference to the old player; once I found out why Shinji kept the SDAT in canon (semi-canon, anyway), I figured that having it still be a gift from his dad would be enough of a parallel there.

And yes, the song Shinji's hearing in the last scene is the fic namer, "How Do You Talk to an Angel?" by The Heights. It's worth a listen, even if you're not a fan of '80s music.

'Til next time!


End file.
